Kathryn Paige Harden (behavioral geneticist)

Kathryn Paige Harden (Original Sin On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness) is a psychologist, professor, and behavioral geneticist. Kathryn joins the Armchair Expert to discuss why psychology is not a solved problem, studying the essential question of why we do things we don’t want to do, and how her religious upbringing was fundamentally at odds with her desire to study psychology. Kathryn and Dax talk about what living in a culture that embraces the concept of original sin means for our morality, genetic predictors of misdemeanor versus felony behavior, and our active human inclination to break stuff. Kathryn explains her belief that holding each other accountable is not a supernatural condition but a social one, why we can aim to be better in our institutions than in our worst moments, and the scientific fact that there’s no evolution without diversity. Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/ Head to turbotax.com to find a store location near you and get matched with a TurboTax expert — with real-time updates in the iOS app. This episode is sponsored by AppleTV. Learn more at: https://tinyurl.com/mr2caw2c See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Padman.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 0:06Dax Shepard?

  Today, we have Catherine Paige Harden. She's a professor of psychology at where we should have gone, University of Texas, Austin, where she directs the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab. Her previous books include The Genetic Lottery, Why DNA Matters for Social Equality. And her new book, which is so tasty, is called Original Sin on the Genetics of Vice, The Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. Delicious.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  It's a good one.

• 0:36Dax Shepard?

  Please enjoy Catherine Paige Harden. This episode of Armchair Expert is presented by Apple TV, the new US home of Formula One. Starting March 7th, you can watch complete, all-access, live coverage of every Grand Prix, including practice, qualifying, and sprints, all in one place. Watch every race live, only on Apple TV. We get support from Quince.

• 1:00Speaker 01

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• 1:09Dax Shepard?

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• 1:32Speaker 01

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• 1:50Dax Shepard?

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• 1:59Speaker 01

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• 2:18Dax Shepard?

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• 2:54Speaker 02

  I brought you something.

• 2:55Dax Shepard?

  Oh, OK.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Which is that I brought you the UK copy of the book because it has a much cooler cover.

• 3:01Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I'll say it does. It's reminiscent of Beowulf. It's a boar's face on a woman's head. Tell me more about that.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  I think they were thinking about how there's a lot of animal research in there.

• 3:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  And also just thinking about in what ways are we animals? You know, in what ways are morality connected to the animal world? Yeah, I sent them a whole mood board and my US publisher was like, all of these look like novels or poetry collections. It doesn't read science on fiction. And then my UK editor was like, let's go.

• 3:33Dax Shepard?

  Let's party.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Let's do something weird.

• 3:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what are the known differences in how UK publishing in the US publishing differs?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  I don't think I know because this is my first rodeo.

• 3:44Dax Shepard?

  The English are so fascinating, aren't they?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yes, I think they're darker and twistier and more repressed.

• 3:49Dax Shepard?

  Because they're, yes, exactly. The repression begats, more perversion.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  I totally agree. It's a Freudian analysis of the British culture, but I believe that.

• 3:59Dax Shepard?

  I'm so sneaky.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Hi, hello. It's so nice to meet you.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  So nice to meet you.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Thank you for inviting me. This is such a surreal treat.

• 4:08Dax Shepard?

  So let's start. Did you just fly in from Austin?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  I did, last night.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 4:11Dax Shepard?

  You teach at UT, right?

• 4:12Speaker 02

  I teach at UT.

• 4:13Dax Shepard?

  Where did you go to undergrad?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  I went to Furman University, which is... Have you heard of it?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  I have. My friend's mom went to Furman.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Back when it was Baptist, probably.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Probably, yes.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  So it's a small liberal arts school in Greenville, South Carolina. And it was a Baptist college until, I think, like 1995. And then I started in 1999. I'm dating myself here. So it still was private, southern, still very southern Baptist in its inclination.

• 4:40Dax Shepard?

  But you were evangelical, so how does that jive with being Baptist? Did your parents worry?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  No, it was sort of the general kind of Protestant, conservative, fundamentalist. It wasn't culturally very different than my upbringing. And they give a lot of scholarship money away. So I actually wanted to go to Vanderbilt because I loved Nashville.

• 4:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  But I didn't get the full ride, and Furman paid for me to go.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  So that's how I ended up at Furman.

• 5:04Dax Shepard?

  What part of Texas did you grow up in?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  I grew up in Memphis, actually.

• 5:06Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you grew up in Memphis?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you just live in Texas. I got chem...

• 5:09Speaker 02

  I live in Texas. My dad was a Top Gun pilot.

• 5:13Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  So we moved around when I was little. And then he worked for FedEx, and FedEx is in Memphis.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Were you suburbs of Memphis?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, like deep exurbs of Mem... Collierville?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  I lived in Collierville for two years.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Are you serious?

• 5:25Speaker 01

  I did.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  That's wild. How did you end up in Collierville?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Second and third grade, my dad got a job there. And so we went there. My brother was born there. And then we left. My mom hated it.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Collierville Elementary School? Did you go to public school?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  She hated it. I went to, I think it was Miss Zeeman?

• 5:44Speaker 02

  That's amazing. That's a niche cultural overlap.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yes. I remember our house, compared to the house we had just come from, felt like a mansion.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Where were you coming from?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  I was coming from Georgia, and it was a small, little house. And this felt like a huge house. I mean, I want to go now.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Sis, see it as an adult.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  You could zillow it if you remember your address.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  I could zillow it.

• 6:12Dax Shepard?

  But it's an upscale area. I was just at either a Sprouts or a Food and uh

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Oh, grocery store.

• 6:17Dax Shepard?

  Remember I did a stop outside of Memphis and one of the gals who was visiting said, you know, this is where Monica lived.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  That's wild.

• 6:24Dax Shepard?

  It's kind of nice, right?

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, we moved there in like the mid eighties. So it was very, very small. It was still its own town. And I think my parents were getting out of the military, transitioning to a job. And they wanted a house where they could raise kids. And so they bought out in Carville. Yeah, so funny.

• 6:44Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so you graduated from there and did you do graduate school somewhere?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yes. So then I went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for my PhD, which was lovely. I mean Charlottesville, I don't know if you've been.

• 6:56Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  A lovely place and a lovely place to be a graduate student because you can live there even though you are below the poverty line.

• 7:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  You know, I think I made $12,000 a year when I was a graduate student and I still live there and I was very happy.

• 7:10Dax Shepard?

  And the college was famously designed by Jefferson?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  UVA was Jefferson's academical village. And so he designed the rotunda, which is this Palladian architecture in the middle of campus. And there's still kind of his original architecture down the mall. And then you see from certain places in town, Monticello.

• 7:32Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you can.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  So it's very Jeffersonianly inflected. It has a kind of pomp to it because of that.

• 7:38Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh. And you got your PhD in?

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Clinical psychology.

• 7:43Dax Shepard?

  What's the transition from that to then teaching at UT? Did you have stops in other places?

• 7:47Speaker 02

  So I had an unusual path that I went to my faculty job almost immediately after graduate school. So in order to get a PhD in clinical psych, you do the research part of the graduate work and you do a dissertation. But then you also have to do a year-long clinical internship, which is in a hospital or a VA or a University Counseling Center. It's all direct patient hours. And that gets you the PhD in clinical psychology.

• 8:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  So I had this one year in Boston, where I worked at McLean Hospital, which is outside of Boston and Belmont. It's where, have you seen or read Girl Interrupted?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Susanna Cason. That's McLean. So it's kind of this storied place in American psychiatric history. So it was this strange year of my life where I went from doing a lot of research and a little clinical work to one year, full-time, inpatient psychiatry, eating disorders, psychotic disorders, personality disorders.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Wow, so intense.

• 8:47Dax Shepard?

  So this hospital, McLean, what reputation is it? Is it like where everyone would show up? Is it that kind of? Is it more private?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  It looks in some ways like a college campus. And then there are these tunnels that connect the buildings. And they put all the graduate interns in the tunnels. That's where your office is. If you've ever seen the Angelina Jolie movie, there's a lot of scenes in the tunnels. And those do exist. But it is a private hospital. And so you get this interesting mix of people who just ended up there because that's where they went. And people who went there because that's where MIT will refer graduate students if they're having a first psychotic episode. Or people who come from old money in Boston.

• 9:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like, are there any people going there to rest? That kind of vibe?

• 9:31Speaker 02

  No.

• 9:32Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  It's really hard to go to a psychiatric hospital to rest.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 9:36Dax Shepard?

  Well, rest is in quotes. Like, they would say they're going away to rest, but really, they're having a psychotic episode.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  The bar's probably pretty. You gotta be showing.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, you still have to be, even self-pay patients, which are a very privileged minority. I mean, and this is true of psychiatric hospitals in every city in America, which is the need is so much higher than the number of beds.

• 9:58Dax Shepard?

  Oh, right.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  That you really have to be at a level of functioning that's pretty impaired in order to be staying kind of residential or inpatient in a psychiatric hospital.

• 10:07Dax Shepard?

  And did you have any kind of awakening during that clinical work? Where your interest shifted? Or you thought you were gonna do one thing, but this experience clinically changed you?

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Yes and no. So I knew when I was a college student that I wanted to be a scientist and I wanted to be a professor. And that was my goal. So I knew even on internship that I wasn't gonna stay in full-time clinical care, that I was gonna pivot, try to get a faculty job, start a lab. My primary... Life activity professionally was going to be doing science. I think what working in an inpatient facility impresses upon you is that psychiatry is not a solved problem. There's still a level of distress and impairment that no amount of money and no amount of resources and no amount of being the high functioning Harvard grad student or MIT graduate student can get you out of.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  So part of my clinical work was in case management, which is, okay, now when someone's leaving hospital, where are they going?

• 11:11Dax Shepard?

  What's the aftercare plane?

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Who are they living with? Who is going to make sure that they can get to appointment? How are their medication going to be filled? Even for people with resources, that is an incredibly difficult thing to manage. So just as like a lived experience in bad systems hurt us all, even the most privileged among us, it was kind of a radicalizing experience to work in that situation.

• 11:34Dax Shepard?

  Well, it could make you quite pessimistic, I think, that experience.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  It can, but then you also see people who get better, or even if they don't get healed. Like, there's no healing. You're not going to become not schizophrenic. You're not going to not have bipolar disorder anymore. And that doesn't mean that there isn't ways to help make your life better and less distressed today. So this kind of ruthless pragmatism of, we can't make your brain different totally, but we can make you less distressed in this moment about these hallucinations that you're having.

• 12:11Dax Shepard?

  I guess you would just have, yeah, variable goals as opposed to an oncologist is like, we must beat the cancer. That's the signal of success.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  There's that line, which is, hope is a discipline. And I do think that working with the most seriously impaired patients in a hospital setting make you realize that you're not hoping for miracles. You're not hoping for overnight transformation. You're having a discipline of what can we do today, given our tools and resources, to make tomorrow better? That is a perspective that I think I've carried into my adult life.

• 12:44Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so your current lab at UT deals with development.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:50Dax Shepard?

  And so how do we get into that as our focus?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so let's start at the beginning.

• 12:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  So my first job in science, when I was an undergrad at Furman, was a research assistant in a mouse lab. So they studied opioid addiction and withdrawal, and I loved it. It was my first job in science. My previous jobs had been waitress in a diner, retail shop girl, and I wasn't good at any of them. And then now, I just thought, this is amazing. So when I was deciding on graduate school, I wanted to stay thinking about genetics, thinking about the brain, thinking about addiction, antisocial behavior, but not in mice. I didn't want to work with rodents anymore. So I ended up in a clinical psychology program, which is about those same problems, but in people. And then I went to McLean,

• 13:39Speaker 02

  where I worked with some people who were recovering from substance use disorders, some people with serious mental illness. But I had this one rotation on an eating disorders unit, which was all adolescent girls. And that really solidified my interest in adolescence as this incredibly important period in the lifespan. So then when I started my lab at UT, it was really, how do I pull all of this together? So we're looking at genes, we're looking at the brain, we're looking at addictive behaviors, but how they began in late childhood and adolescence, and what's the kind of nature and nurture of those things? So it was trying to pull together those different threads into one research program.

• 14:20Dax Shepard?

  And would you agree, from 98, did you say, when you started college?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  I started in 99.

• 14:24Dax Shepard?

  99, till now, even that statement, nature versus nurture, then was kind of an ironclad dichotomy, which now, no one who's hip to it thinks those are different things in a lot of different ways, which we'll explore. I want to go back to the lab work you were doing on the opioid. I think what might be interesting, because your book is very unique, Original Sin. It's very memoir and academic. There's a lot going on in it. The professor who you were working under, she herself was a recovering cocaine addict.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:57Dax Shepard?

  And do you think her kind of openness about that? Liberated you for the rest of your life and being not a presentational professor, but someone, no, no, I'm a whole person. I'm not going to pretend.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  So what's so fascinating is that I didn't know that.

• 15:11Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you didn't know that about her?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  She hadn't disclosed that to me. I learned that later when I was no longer a student. And then she wrote a memoir of her own. It's called Never Enough. It's very good by Judith Griselle. And how she changed me was how she showed up in the world and in her work every day. So I came from this relatively religiously fundamentalist household. And many of the women that I knew growing up were primarily stay at home moms, didn't work outside the home. So I just hadn't seen many adult women who were running labs and doing research and being professors.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  And so I happened to get this research assistant job with her as an 18 year old, new baby adult. And I remember she came to the lab the first morning and she was late because it was such a beautiful morning. She decided to bike and she just had this freedom of how she showed up in her everyday life.

• 16:12Dax Shepard?

  She sounds Attic-y already.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  That really made me be like, what is this? Like, what is this person? Who is this lady? And so I worked for her and then I took a bio psychology class where for our final, she would just give us names of drugs and we had to draw where in the brain and what neurochemical systems they were. And so I really learned this very intellectual approach to understanding addiction from someone who had lived experience, but I didn't know that at the time. And then when I finally got to know her a little bit as a person later on, I was like, no wonder I thought you were so cool when I was 18.

• 16:53Dax Shepard?

  Prior to that, I'm sure what you learned in your day to day life as a kid in Memphis in an evangelical home is like, addiction is a failure of willpower and morality. It's a character flaw, whereas this laboratory was demonstrating, oh, when you give these mice opiates, their brains immediately adapt, requiring a larger dosage. They are absolutely incapable of not becoming addicted to it because that's how the thing functions in their head. Like, I think that would have been very illuminating as far as what you had been told.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  It's totally paradigm shifting. I think that if you're raised and you think that Drug use is a sin and that the answer to sin is prayer, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, atonement, that addicts deserve to be punished in order to punish the sin out of them, which, as we know, that's not very effective. And on the one hand, all of those things can be very powerful for people who want to change their lives. A spiritual practice, a relationship to a higher power. And at the same time, that's not the whole story.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Addiction doesn't exist on some metaphysical plane that's free-floating away from our bodies and our brains. Yeah. And it's also not even a uniquely human phenomenon. And so I think to go from a very moralizing perspective on addiction to understanding it as a natural phenomenon, this is something that we can make happen in mice, and this is something that we can manipulate in mice by injecting things into their brains. That is a fundamentally different way of seeing the relationship between the body and behavior. And also a different perspective on what needs to be done if you don't want people to be addicted to opioids. It offers a new lens of a path forward. Yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  When you were like coming home and talking to your parents about the things you were learning and stuff, how did that go?

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Oh, that's such an interesting question. I don't have very clear memories of this, except for two interactions that I had with family members, when I told them, this isn't a passing phase. I'm going to go to graduate school. I really want to make psychology and genetics and science my life. And one of my family members said, I think psychology keeps people from Jesus. Another one said, oh, I was afraid you were going to say that. So there really was a sense of... This way of seeing the world and this endeavor is dissonant, maybe in ways that we haven't fully articulated to ourselves, maybe couldn't necessarily fully articulate to you from our worldview.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  And I do think psychology is kind of a radical science. I mean, you are an anthropologist. Anthropology, if you study it, you see the world differently for the rest of your life.

• 19:53Dax Shepard?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  And I think psychology does the same thing. I teach intro psych at UT, and we introduce it as psych is the scientific study of the mind, brain, and behavior. And if you just think about that as a phrase, the scientific study of the mind and behavior, it really is a paradigm that changes the way that you see the world and can be inconsistent with how other people see behavior, especially bad behavior. Yeah, blame. Yes. When you're in a blaming mindset, you're in this judge's mindset, then everything that you see is filtered through that lens, and that prevents you from seeing clearly.

• 20:31Dax Shepard?

  Or disgust, like that's a very powerful one, too.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Yes, disgust, too.

• 20:34Dax Shepard?

  OK, so your book starts off, you about to take a trip with your boyfriend to go do LSD in the desert in West Texas. You're gonna have your kids go to Dad's house for the weekend. And we quickly learn that, you know, you'd done LSD once before, and that your boyfriend was like, let's not fuck till after. We're coming hard for a professor. I'm like, oh, this is already juicy and fun. And then also just kind of brave. How do you get liberated to write? I admire it, and I think it's fantastic. But you're also a professor. I'm like, does it cross your mind while you're writing?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  100%. I have 1,000 students in my intro psych class right now. And this is not usually the parts of my life that I share with them. So there's a couple of things here. One is, I wanted to write something that felt different on the page than many social scientists, psychologists, academic philosophers write. There's a lot of great nonfiction that are written by other professors. And Those books can be awesome. And also, there is a kind of continuity of tone and voice across them. As a writer, I kind of just wanted to see if I could pull something off that was a little bit different.

• 21:51Dax Shepard?

  I love it. You're starting off, as we already talked about, as a kind of what we might call recovering Christian. So you have a lot of your own stuff going on.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:59Dax Shepard?

  So tell us about the acid trip and how it kind of informed you to write this.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  The other thing is, the book is called Original Sin. And that name, that phrase, "original sin," we get from Saint Augustine in the Church, who came up with this idea that Adam and Eve sinned in the garden. And that original defiance of God is inherited over generation to generation, such that what you inherit could not just predispose you, but actually condemn you, damn you, make it inevitable that you're going to behave in ways that are amoral or immoral.

• 22:37Dax Shepard?

  To the degree that his conclusion was, yes, infants are sinful.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Infants are sinful. Infants deserve to go to hell.

• 22:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  And that thing that you inherited, even though it wasn't your fault, it's your burden. It doesn't get you off the hook. It doesn't make you less damnable. It makes you more damnable. That theme, that idea, I think, is carried through now. Even if we're not Christian, even if we were never raised in that tradition, even if we've never heard of Augustine, we live in a culture that's shaped by these ideas about, what does it mean to have a body that seems sometimes at odds with what you want that body to do? And what does it mean to be morally responsible, responsible to each other? If we have cells and we have amygdala, we can also study that from the perspective of scientists.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  There's a content warning to those of you who don't like scripture being quoted, but there's this line in the Bible book, Romans, Paul's letter to the Romans, where Paul writes, "The things I don't want to do, I keep on doing. And the things I do want to do, I don't do." And I think that captures such a fundamental human experience. Oh, yes. Things I don't want to do, I keep on doing. So we can think about, why do humans do things that they don't want to do? That's a fundamental problem. And we can come at that from an objective perspective, as scientists, as philosophers, as scholars.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  But the reason why that question is pressing is because we all have lived that experience internally. We haven't a subjective experience.

• 24:19Dax Shepard?

  Anyone who's looked in a food pantry has experienced that. What I should do and there's what I want to do.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I didn't want to write a book that is about this tension between the objective and the subjective and only have the objective perspective in there and not have any of the, well, what is it like to be a person? Yeah, it's inherent in the topic. That are messy. Yeah. And then the last thing is Augustine's most famous book is his Confessions. It's a memoir. And I thought, well, if he can do it, and that can be a book of ideas, why can't we have a memoir that's also a serious book of ideas? So that was my goal.

• 24:55Dax Shepard?

  And his intellectual adversary was, what, how do you say?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  I think it's Pelagius, but some people say Pelagius.

• 25:01Dax Shepard?

  So Pelagius was coming from the opposite point of view, and this was a grand debate in Christianity, right?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  This was the grand debate. So I went to Christian school my whole life, and no one ever told me that the doctrine of original sin, this idea that you inherit Adam's sin, is something that was invented 400 years after the birth of Christ. So we have had, at this point, centuries of Christians who understand a relationship between the body and morality. And then Augustine comes along and is like, actually, no, you inherit sin. You inherit physically. That's why he was so anti-sex, as he thought, well, there's no possibility of having good sex because every time you procreate, you physically pass on this.

• 25:42Dax Shepard?

  You transmit.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  You transmit it to the next generation. And his big adversary, Pelagius, was like, what are you talking about? So they're from opposite ends of the British Empire. Pelagius is British, Augustine is from North Africa. And Pelagius says, if something's inherited, it can't be sin. It's either nature or it's morality.

• 26:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, the framing is if it's nature, that's not choice.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:09Dax Shepard?

  And only choice is sinful, right?

• 26:10Speaker 02

  It had to be an act of will in order to be sin. And if you think about this... Dynamic of someone saying, "You inherit a body that's bad, and your nature just makes you more punishable." Or if something is of the body, in the body, nature, then it's not an act of will, it's not morality, we can't hold each other morally responsible for it at all. You see that dynamic everywhere in contemporary culture. Every conversation we have about weight, about sex, about drugs, about addiction, you see these two perspectives. And they don't say, "I'm siding with this third, fourth, fifth century church father," when they do it, it's secularized.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  I think it's interesting to think about, how did those ideas still influence how we respond to the science? And also, is there another option?

• 27:02Dax Shepard?

  Well, I was just gonna say.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Why are we stuck with the only two options that were given to us nearly two millennia ago at this point?

• 27:09Dax Shepard?

  Well, and I think when people hear those two options laid out, they will be drawn to one or the other. And I think what is interesting is, as you go through different examples, I will guarantee that you will flip-flop a lot. At first, I would go, "No, that's horseshit," right? So that's my knee-jerk. But then, weirdly, as we understand behavior and genetics' role in behavior, again, on a big spectrum, that's also true. We do inherit things. Whether I'm gonna label them sin or not is not really relevant, but lo and behold, you do inherit quite a bit. That has nothing to do with your will or choice. And so in some weird ways, we do inherit.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  That's not positive to you. That can be negative.

• 27:49Dax Shepard?

  As we'll uncover. But let's go back to the acid trip, because you're having a lovely time. And Travis, okay, now he's your husband.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got married.

• 27:57Dax Shepard?

  Okay, congratulations. But Travis has a terrible trip.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  He does.

• 28:00Dax Shepard?

  And he is caught in a hallucination where he has crashed the car, he has killed you, and he is to blame.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yes, it was awful.

• 28:08Dax Shepard?

  I've been with someone on a terrible trip.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  That's horrible, and you were also tripping? And I was also, and I had come out of it a little bit, but you know, if you're still tripping a little bit, you're not the best companion if someone's having a very bad trip. Oh, my God. You know, there's a contagion there. So I think there's several things about this story. One is, this is a reason why you should not do psychedelic drugs unless you have really trusted people to process the experience afterward with. I don't necessarily say that in the book so explicitly, but this turned into a piece of art in terms of the book and growth for him, in part because he could talk about it with me and his friends and his parents and his therapist. And like, we could really integrate that into our experience.

• 28:53Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  So I think we're learning more and more that psychedelics can be really powerful tools for growth and discovery. But it's not just like, insert drug, output growth. There needs to be some processing and human interaction and attachment that helps you make that experience coherent and learn from it. It was this horrific time in which he was absolutely convinced that he had done something wrong. He was absolutely convinced that there was no way he could have not done it every time the loop was played. And he was absolutely convinced that he was totally guilty of doing it, that he was totally on the hook for this action.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  And so it was, in so many ways, the lived experience of this Christian doctrine of original sin, which is, there's no way for this to have gone any other way, and you are 100% damnable. You're guilty for doing it. I didn't know this at the time. My mind wasn't going like, okay, I understand why this experience is so intellectually and personally meaningful to me. It's his trip, why am I writing about it? And it took a while to really articulate, what does this experience have to teach me? Why can I not forget about this?

• 30:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  And that was the connection. It was in that moment that felt so true. This thing that I've completely dismissed as like a relic of my Christian childhood. Is it true? Are we on the hook for things that we can't change? What does it mean to be on the hook for things we can't change? And that's where the book goes from there.

• 30:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think it opens the door to a really compelling thought process, which is blame in itself. You give the example of Oedipus, who's sexed with his mom and kills his father, and then gouges his own eyes out.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:48Dax Shepard?

  And he gouges his own eyes out even though he's not to blame. He didn't know. There's also this juicy debate about is blame relevant if the person had no idea? There are schools of thought that yes, they are. And there are schools that no. So let's talk about blame a little bit.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. So complicated. So just what is blame? Part of blame is an emotion. Blame is this feeling of I'm outraged and I'm entitled to be outraged. Or I'm resentful and I'm entitled to be resentful because you've done something that violates some moral norms, some social norms, some legal norm. The philosopher Peter Strassen, who's working in the middle of the 20th century, called this the reactive attitudes. And basically argued, I think convincingly, that there is no human life without other people mattering to you in a way that makes you sometimes really pissed off at them because they have hurt you in some way.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  So the blame is this idea of I am entitled to have these reactive attitudes to you. I'm even entitled maybe to make you suffer or want other people to make you suffer because you've done this bad thing. Part of the journey that I took in writing this book, I actually wrote this book, I wrote a draft of it, and I sent it to my editor. And she was like, this book reads like you figured out what you were thinking as you were writing it. So now that you figured that out, can you please rewrite it? So then I took it apart and I had to rewrite it. And so part of my journey in this book is really thinking about what is the difference between blame and accountability? And I think blame is you've done something bad. You're bad.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  I'm entitled to treat you like you're bad. I'm entitled to feel. Outrage and resentment at you. Does accountability have to be that? And that was a big intellectual growth and personal growth for me over writing the book. It's trying to pull those ideas apart in my brain.

• 32:48Dax Shepard?

  Because on one hand, we think that blame is warranted when a decision was an option and you picked one or the other. You picked wrong, so you deserve blame.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:58Dax Shepard?

  But we're very forgiving if you had no choice. You weren't aware of a choice. We don't seem to blame there. But then back to the biblical framing. If you sin, regardless of you knew it was a sin or not, it's a sin.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  You're still blame worthy.

• 33:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so it's like we already have kind of two radically opposed.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  There's a lot of different ideas that we can realize are contradictory in our collective sort of cultural unconscious that are pulling on our intuitions in different ways.

• 33:28Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Apple TV, the new US home of Formula One. You can now watch complete all access live coverage of every Grand Prix, including practice, qualifying and sprints, all in one place. I will be consuming all of those things, Monica.

• 33:48Speaker 01

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• 33:49Dax Shepard?

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• 34:31Dax Shepard?

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• 35:14Dax Shepard?

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• 36:44Dax Shepard?

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• 37:26Dax Shepard?

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• 37:36Speaker 01

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• 37:43Dax Shepard?

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• 38:13Dax Shepard?

  I think we should maybe attempt to define sin as we'll be using it.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  So I think we can define sin in two different ways. I think it's been defined in two different ways in church history. And then also it corresponds to these kind of two different notions of blame that we've been talking about. So one is, sin is... Doing something that you ought not to have done. There is some rule in your society, that's a moral rule, that's a legal rule, that's a social rule, that says thou ought not kill someone, thou ought not have sex with someone that's not your spouse, and you do it anyway. And usually, breaking rules comes with some sort of censure or punishment. And it has to be an active choice or no?

• 39:01Speaker 02

  And it just has to be an act, either way.

• 39:04Dax Shepard?

  You say your favorite definition of it is from Francis Spofford?

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:08Dax Shepard?

  Definition, uppercase sin is the human propensity to fuck things up. It's our active inclination to break stuff. Stuff here includes moods, promises, relationships we care about, and our own well-being, and other people's.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:21Dax Shepard?

  So I think that's a lovely thing for us to think about.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  And I think it gets to, one, it's not just like there's some authority that's telling you what not to do. When you violate a norm, you are hurting people. Often, you're hurting people you care about or people who care about you. And so that tendency to fuck up your relationships because you're doing things that you shouldn't be doing because the rule is there to protect the relationship or to protect the community. I think that's a really good way to think about sin. What's interesting about that definition is he says it's the tendency to do that. And I think this is where we can kind of have two definitions of sin. Is sin the action, the doing it? Or is sin the tendency to do it? Right.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Which could be governed by all sorts of things. And I think in the Augustine tradition of you inherit sin, you're not inheriting doing something, you're inheriting a tendency The want to do it. to do something. When you're thinking about, are you to blame for what you've done? And then the choice comes in. But sometimes we blame people for even wanting to do something, you know, for being prone to do something.

• 40:31Dax Shepard?

  We've even had criminal cases where someone was thinking about cannibalism, and that became a court case. Where do we delineate between thinking of something and?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:39Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so that's all of your kind of personal journey. But then your professional journey, which predates this book, which is heavily involved in the book, is that you publish a paper that talks about a certain aggregate of genes that you have discovered that overlap with really increased outcomes of addiction, aggressive behavior, eating disorders, sexual promiscuity, a whole bevy of different behaviors that seem to be linked by some grouping of genes.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Yes. So my lab is in what the field is known as behavioral and psychiatric genetics. So what we're interested in doing is discovering certain parts of the genome, certain parts of your DNA sequence that differ between people that increase your likelihood of developing a certain mental disorder, mental illness, and/or behaving in a certain way. And this is a method, kind of a general enterprise, that is shared across lots of labs, across lots of countries, most of whom have nothing to do with anything that we would consider moral behavior. And the way these studies work is you're basically gutting DNA from millions of people.

• 41:53Dax Shepard?

  God bless Scandinavians, right? Let's give them a shout out.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Scandinavians, Iceland, UK Biobank, which is in the UK, and then 23andMe customers. So it's a lot of people that are white, British, 60-year-olds who've been into a tube and given the British government so much information about their lives.

• 42:12Dax Shepard?

  And also in Scandinavia, their medical records are public, although the identity is obscured, so you can do these enormous epidemiological studies.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  And they link across medical records, criminal legal system involvement records.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  They don't do that in China?

• 42:26Dax Shepard?

  Well, if they do, they're not.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  They wouldn't have the data to us.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  They're not sharing, but they're probably doing it.

• 42:31Dax Shepard?

  But how they infamously debunked these vaccine autism connection claims was they were able to look at a group of 3 million kids who had been vaccinated, and then a million that had not, and they could immediately show there's no difference.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  There's no difference there.

• 42:46Dax Shepard?

  So that's where it's like this huge benefit.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  You have these huge data sets, and you're basically... Going through and you're saying, where do people differ in their DNA? And are those differences correlated with whatever behavior that I'm interested in? So what we were really interested in, in my group, was what's known as conduct disorder, which is this diagnosis that's given to children if they are persistently breaking rules, aggressing against other people, maybe aggressing against animals. And there just wasn't the data on that in enough people. So our strategy was basically to say, what other behaviors do we think are caused by

• 43:27Speaker 02

  the same genes because of family studies, because of adoption studies, for which we do have enough data on huge numbers of people? Let's pull as much data as we can on all these different behaviors and kind of triangulate across them to be like, what genes are associated with all of them? So we were looking at ADHD symptoms in childhood. We were looking at sexual behavior, age for sexual intercourse, and number of sexual partners. The UK Biobank, if you say that you've had more than 99 sexual partners, it gives you a follow-up question, which is, are you sure?

• 44:06Dax Shepard?

  Wow, that's very cultural.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Are you sure? Are you sure that you've had more than 99 sexual partners? Have you ever smoked pot? Have you ever smoked a cigarette? Are you engaged in problematic alcohol use? So you drink to the point that it's a problem in your life? And do you describe yourself as a risk taker? And none of these are serious antisocial behavior, like having sex at a slightly younger age, or like being a little bit more hyperactive. Most people wouldn't even consider that necessarily sinful behavior. But what all those things have in common is someone in our society, maybe not your group, but someone in our society thinks that's bad behavior. And you did it anyways. You had sex even though in 1960s England, it maybe wasn't that acceptable.

• 44:53Dax Shepard?

  Is that like misdemeanor sin?

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Misdemeanor, that's a great word. And what's interesting is that if you identify genes that are associated with these misdemeanors that are consistently associated with all of them. You end up with a set of genes that also predict felonies.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Like, literally predict your likelihood of ever being arrested, of ever pulling a knife or gun on someone, of engaging in much more serious antisocial behavior. It also predicts if you've ever attempted suicide. So it also predicts kind of this harmful disinhibition against the self.

• 45:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and in this paper, you established that this group, the people who share this cluster of genes, are twice as likely to be arrested.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:36Dax Shepard?

  So that's a pretty significant finding.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:38Dax Shepard?

  And I'll add, too, it's not the case of 1 in 1 million versus 2 in 1 million. This is like 20% versus 40%.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Many Americans have a lot of interactions with the criminal legal system. But yeah, so it's not destiny, right? It's not 100%. It's not all genetic. This probably goes without saying, but no geneticist believes really in genetic determinism. This is not a set of genes that fate you to be arrested, but it is a very significant increase in risk, and it's a significant increase in your risk of developing an addictive disorder, too. And this is tricky to think through. How should this information, if at all, affect our judgments of the moral blameworthiness and the legal responsibility that are attached ordinarily to these behaviors?

• 46:29Dax Shepard?

  Well, I think the adoption studies are really interesting. That's another great resource, right, to establish a genetic predisposition to some of those behaviors. So tell us about what we discovered.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so again, this is thank goodness for the Northern European countries that have these registries. Although there are some good adoption studies in the United States, too. My colleague Janay Niederheiser runs one of them. So what you're looking at is children who've been given up for adoption at birth or very near birth and raised by adoptive parents in a closed adoption, where they're not having contact with the biological parent. Does the characteristic of the biological mother or father, or both, predict something about the child's outcome, regardless of the adoptive parent that they were? And what these studies show you is that it's always nature and nurture. So if you're adopted into a family where they have substance use problems,

• 47:23Speaker 02

  you're more likely to have substance use problems. But if your biological parents were... Addicted to substances or had ever committed a violent crime, you are more likely to develop those same things.

• 47:37Dax Shepard?

  Three times more likely.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Even if you never met them, even if you're raised by other people. And those odds ratios can change, you know, and for some things it's as high as three. Sometimes it's one and a half times more likely. These are people that you've never met, that never raised you, and it still is affecting your behavior.

• 47:55Dax Shepard?

  I like this line, "Adopted children who never lived with their biological parents are three times more likely to abuse drugs if biological parents abuse drugs." Identical twins are similar in their drug abuse as they are in their body mass index or coronary artery disease.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, wow.

• 48:11Dax Shepard?

  Isn't that telling?

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there was a great paper published in 2015 by Tinko Polderman and Nature Genetics, where they looked at 50 years of twin studies and aggregating across all of those twins, how similar are identical twins, how similar are fraternal twins, what psychiatric traits look like. They look almost identical to cardiovascular traits. I find that a really interesting comparison for our intuitions because we are now so used to thinking, of course, your body weight is nature, of course, it's nurture, of course, it's gene environment interactions. Of course, you have some agency, but also a limited amount of it. At least that's your experience of it. And your set point that you inherited from your parents

• 48:55Speaker 02

  that maybe got cannibalized really early in your life, all make a difference. We can do that so easily when it comes to weight. Why do we have such a hard time doing that with becoming addictive to alcohol or drugs?

• 49:08Dax Shepard?

  On a scale, addiction, we can kind of get there. Violence, we don't want.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  We don't want to go. We don't want to let anyone off the hook for that. Because violence has a clear victim other than the person doing the behavior. So addiction can hurt other people, but the primary victim is the person using. And so when we're asked to make sense of the science.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  And we tend towards a kind of Pelagianism of it's either biological nature or moral. And we're asked to choose. For body weight, we can be like, okay, let's reclassify this as biological instead of moral. With addiction, there's like, I don't know. But then as soon as it's obviously a moral issue, because there's nothing that gets closer to the heart of what humans think immoral behavior is than hurting another person deliberately.

• 50:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  And then we're saying, we're not going to be able to reclassify this as not moral. And also, you have to take seriously that there's a biological element of it, but that doesn't mean that some people are born bad. That's such a mindfuck, I think, for Americans, to keep all of that in their heads at the same time.

• 50:20Dax Shepard?

  Yes. They're all a part of this aggregate of genes you have identified.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  It's not just me. This is such a team science effort. My former graduate student just is an author on the paper that I just finished. And if he's listening to this, he's probably like, it was me doing all this. I'm the one in the trenches. But I think a really great example is just one gene. And one gene in isolation has a tiny effect, but I think it's illustrative anyway. It's this CADM2. It's a cell adhesion molecule gene. And if you look at what it's associated with, it's associated with having sex with more people and putting more salt in your food and smoking cigarettes and becoming addicted to alcohol.

• 51:04Dax Shepard?

  I don't need to take the genetic test. I clearly have this.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  And what is it associated with? It's associated with doing things that bring you short-term pleasure, but you might have a voice in the back of your head saying, it's not a good idea, that have potential negative consequences. That really troubles our sense of who we are, to think that a gene could be involved in that.

• 51:24Dax Shepard?

  It threatens our agency.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Why do I do the things I don't want to do?

• 51:27Dax Shepard?

  But I think it would be a great time to educate people on. I think the colloquial understanding of genes is a little too simple, which is, we like to think there's, they found the gene, the BRCA gene. And there are a handful of these genes, but there are 3 billion genes.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Well, there's probably not 3 billion genes.

• 51:45Dax Shepard?

  How many genes are there?

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Well, I think we're estimating there's 20,000 genes.

• 51:49Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my God. I'm sorry.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  There's many base carries.

• 51:52Dax Shepard?

  There's three billion ACGT on the DNA string.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  Yes. Humans have way fewer genes than we thought that we were gonna have. That was one of the big surprises of the Human Genome Project. It was like, we're so complex. We're gonna have more genes than anyone. There's species of apples, I think, that have more genes than we do. And part of it is because there's a lot of our DNA sequence that used to be called junk DNA that regulates how the genes are read. And that seems to be where a lot of the action is in human uniqueness. Not what are the ingredients, but when are the ingredients combined? So, yes, you're totally right. People think of the gene for. Nearly every psychological characteristic is what we call massively polygenic.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  So, poly means many, genetic gene, which means that it's influenced by thousands and thousands and thousands of genetic variants, of genetic differences between people that are scattered throughout the gene, hundreds of genes, maybe thousands of genes. And each of these genetic differences makes the tiniest little bit of an influence. So, for height, there's not one gene for height unless you have like Marfan's or dwarfism. Most people are taller or shorter because you got a thousand slightly height-increasing genetic variants that increase your height by a millimeter. But you got so many of them that you ended up a tall person rather than a short person.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  In my first book that came out five years ago, I write about this NBA player who happened to sit on a plane next to a geneticist. And the geneticist was like, why are you so tall? You're seven and a half feet tall. And he was like, I don't know. And so, they genotyped him. He didn't have any gigantism. There's no weird, rare thing going on. What it was is, there's the gene that makes you a little bit taller than your siblings. And he just had six standard deviations above the mean in all of these tiny... If you're flipping the genetic coin, it just came up heads like a thousand times in a row, and that's why he's so tall. Everything we're talking about when we're talking about addiction potential or likelihood statistically to be arrested for a crime.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  There's no crime gene, there's no addiction gene, just like there's really no obesity gene. There's lots of genetic differences. And so there's a distribution. But then every distribution, there's someone who ends up on the tails of that distribution. And that's where we see really big differences in their likelihood of developing one of these disorders.

• 54:28Dax Shepard?

  Is AI going to completely make these correlations come rapid pace? Like, you must be using AI to go through all this DNA info.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  So one of the big challenges now is we can find genes now that we have many people more rapidly than we can figure out what the heck they're doing.

• 54:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  There's still ambiguity sometime as to like which gene this genetic variant is. Because it's located next to this one and this one. What do we know about that? And then how do these combine to affect protein, to affect cells in which part of the brain?

• 55:01Dax Shepard?

  I guess, I mean, in that it's a pattern recognition machine. I feel like they'll be coming hot and fast.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  I'm very low confidence about my predictions for AI. Because I feel like the whole field is moving more rapidly than I'm comfortable prognosticating about. But it's done amazing things with protein folding problems, which are also really complex. And so how is our knowledge of the genome and the sheer amount of data that's available, plus the advances in AI, where are we going to be in 10 years? I think where we are now would have felt like science fiction 10 years ago. So I'm hopeful that AI will be particularly helpful in this. Okay, we have a gene and then we have an outcome 25 years later, which is being arrested. What is it doing in the body and the brain?

• 55:50Dax Shepard?

  Well, now would be a great time to introduce the fact that this group of genes you and your colleagues have identified are most active in utero.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  There's this idea that you sometimes get in psychiatry that some disorders are neurodevelopmental disorders. So you'll hear that autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder or schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder. And I'm always like, what disorder is not neuro and not developmental? Like, everything is neurodevelopmental.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  And when we're looking at this collection of genes that predict misdemeanors, but also predict more serious antisocial offending and more serious substance use disorders, we can look with reference data sets and be like, okay, well, where in the body and when in development are these genes most turned on, most expressed? And it seems to be in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. So in utero, prenatal development is when these genes are most specifically active. That fits also with what we know from the animal literature on preterm birth,

• 57:03Speaker 02

  which disrupts brain development in utero, is associated with elevated risks of aggressive behavior in animals. Children who are born preterm are at elevated risk for ADHD and conduct problems. There's something about pregnancy and your brain being grown when you're being cooked. That seems to be really important. So much pressure. And I think, again, part of the reason we struggle to make sense of this is we're so used to thinking about adult behaviors as choices. But the person doing that choosing was created by a developmental process that begins in utero and that all of the luck of who they came home from the hospital to is there.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  But that genetic luck starts affecting their brain development even before they come home from the hospital.

• 57:50Dax Shepard?

  And then we get into the juicy philosophical element of this, which is we have come to have appropriate toleration for someone with ADHD, for someone with autism, and these are neural developmental conditions that started in utero. It would hold that we would have that same level of compassion and understanding for the other ones that developed in neuro, which would be addiction and these other behaviors. But then philosophically, we have an interesting line between all of these.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Yes. People's intuitions about what does it mean if you can show that someone's behavior is linked to their early genetic and environmental luck? How should that affect how we treat them? Those intuitions are really unstable, depending on what the behavior is. So if that behavior is... Weight, we're like, well, there's nothing wrong with being heavier or skinnier. If that behavior is sexual orientation, we're like, of course. This is a difference between people. When it comes to addiction, I think we're kind of all over the place, actually, as a culture. But then, as soon as there's harm to another person and there's violence, you're, wait.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  So they might have inherited a predisposition to violence? And that's supposed to make me more compassionate of them?

• 59:09Speaker 01

  This is very Sapolsky, "Determined," that book. I was just thinking about this the other day. I think I'm a determinist. I really do.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Really? That's interesting.

• 59:18Dax Shepard?

  Before you got in here, we were both saying we love Sapolsky, but we don't like determinism.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  You don't? Knowing all this?

• 59:24Speaker 02

  I don't know if I'm a determinist, like, in the academic philosophy sense. So, an academic philosopher would say, a determinist and an incompatibleist is someone who says, "Everything we do is determined by causal factors. Our agency is an illusion. And having the freedom necessary for moral responsibility is incompatible with what we know about the determinist universe." I would say that, I don't know if the universe is a determinist universe or not. That seems like a physics question that's beyond my pay grade. I don't know if we have free will in the way that a lot of philosophers.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  But I think that the practice of holding each other responsible is really baked into being human.

• 1:00:13Dax Shepard?

  A social primate.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  We are a social primate. I think Sapolsky would carry it to, we're not free. So therefore, blame is never appropriate. Punishment is never appropriate. It's as useless to be mad at your husband who cheated on you as it is to be mad at the sky for raining. Whereas I think, I don't know if we live in a determinist world. I don't know if we have free will, but we're all on this planet and we still have to make decisions about how we treat each other.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  And I think holding each other accountable is not a supernatural condition, but a social one.

• 1:00:50Dax Shepard?

  Do you want to hear my two arguments against it? Number one, I think because although I agree, we could look back in time at any behavior we observed, we could look back and we could know every single thing that added up to that behavior. That is knowable. If we knew the location of every atom in the universe, we could see exactly why this effect occurred. That gives you the illusion that we would somehow be able to predict what happens next. But my argument is until you can predict, till you have data, till you have scientifically proven a prediction's possible, bullshit. Because just because you can see how things landed here does not mean you can look forward and predict the future, which would mean it's not deterministic.

• 1:01:32Dax Shepard?

  Secondly, with this amazing dude on, Neil Theis, teaching us about self-organizing complex systems, and all self-organizing complex systems, of which we are one, they have to have divergence in them or they collapse. And divergence is innately non-deterministic. So there cannot be a system without divergence in it.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  So you're not a determinist and I'm not a, we need freedom in order to hold each other responsible. So we have two objections.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm not like a full, I'm not like I'm determined to pick up this cup right now and now I'm doing that. It's not that everything's already decided, but I can recognize it's easy for me to sit here and say, we have to keep that person accountable who behaved this way, when I'm not behaving that way, even though I wasn't gonna behave that way.

• 1:02:19Dax Shepard?

  You're not battling the desire.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. And if I was given the exact same situation genetics, I would be behaving that way. No one's better than, and I don't know that we're making choices so much as living out.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  Living out a program or living out a process.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  That our genes have given us.

• 1:02:39Dax Shepard?

  I think we're living on a very probabilistic situation. We have a very high probability of doing certain things, which I agree with.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that number's very high, actually.

• 1:02:49Dax Shepard?

  For people who are listening who are already jumping to, well, no one's gonna be held accountable. I want to make clear about Sapolsky's argument, indetermined, and your argument as well, I think by the time we get to the end of the book is. There is a huge difference between removing people who are dangerous from hurting other people. No one is arguing for no accounting.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Just letting them go.

• 1:03:07Dax Shepard?

  Yes. The argument is you can take people and remove them from other people so that everyone's safe without blame and without hatred and without being punitive. Many of the people in this country, and in this book, it shocked me to read it, like 60% of Americans believe in hell. So if you believe in the notion of hell, 60% of us do, God believes you should be punished. So of course, our criminal system should involve punishment and pain and suffering and atonement. And so that's the division you and I, and I think Monica would all like to see, which is probably you would have done the same thing in the same environment with the same genes. You're not better than anyone. So let's remove them and make everyone safe and make everyone accountable,

• 1:03:51Dax Shepard?

  but without any of the blame, hatred and moral righteousness.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  The hatred. I mean, I think in particular, the sense of you've done this and therefore you deserve to be scorned. You deserve to be exiled. I'm entitled to be elated and happy and feel pleasure at seeing you suffer.

• 1:04:10Dax Shepard?

  Talk about that study you were talking about when people get shocked.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:13Dax Shepard?

  Please walk us through that.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  Most typically developing humans, they come in and they show empathy at another person's distress very early in life. Like if a baby hears another baby cry, they will start to cry. It's a really innately aversive thing to see a fellow human suffer. Again, we are a social primate.

• 1:04:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  So ordinarily, if you see another person being electrocuted, you see in the person who's observing that, patterns of electrical activity in parts of the brain that ordinarily respond to being pained yourself, right? Like I'm feeling your pain. Unless the person being shocked is first portrayed as being a wrongdoer in some way. They've violated a moral norm.

• 1:04:58Dax Shepard?

  And so they've hooked people's brain up to a presumably an FMRI and they're gonna watch someone get shocked. And if it's a quote, "good guy" that gets shocked, you're gonna see empathy and discomfort.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  And then if you see someone being hurt that was first portrayed as a wrongdoer, then you see brain activity that's more characteristic of pleasure. Dopaminergic areas.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  And that, I think, is telling us multiple interesting things. The first is that, why do we feel pleasure at certain activities? Why do we have dopamine when we have sex and eat sugar and drink water? And interact with people who like us? And experience ourselves being esteemed and watch someone else suffer? That's indicative of how evolutionarily old and necessary to the survival of humans this consequences to violating the social rules is. And this is where also I think differ from Sapolsky is I don't think we're going to reason ourself out of that. Oh, no. Like, I think it's baked into the sauce. I think that telling people that they're going to lay aside their retributive urges

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  is like people advocating for total sexual abstinence and becoming a monk. Some people can do it, but not most people. And it's going to go really against the grain of our nature.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:06:25Dax Shepard?

  This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We've talked before about Rob building our website on Squarespace. And I bring it up again because it's a perfect example of what they do well. Rob had all the pieces, the content, the vision, the ideas, but he needed something to actually take all that and make it public facing. And Squarespace was that bridge. Maybe you're in the same spot. You've been developing something, a business, a skill set, a body of work, and it's been private. It's been yours, but at some point you're ready to put it out there. And that transition from private to public can feel like a huge leap. Squarespace makes it feel like a step. Beautiful templates, built in SEO, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, everything

• 1:07:06Dax Shepard?

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• 1:07:51Dax Shepard?

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• 1:08:35Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Skims. So Monica just informed me that she's a girl's girl and I nodded like I knew exactly what that meant.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the girls who get it, they get it.

• 1:08:47Dax Shepard?

  Okay, but for those of us who are clearly not girls, walk me through it.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Well, you know how much I love my Skims fleece joggers because the plush fleece is so soft. It's cozy. It's really comfortable without feeling too heavy. Well, I went to friend them and she would not stop talking about how comfy they were. She almost didn't give them back to me, which was upsetting, but I'm a girl's girl, so I let her have it.

• 1:09:08Dax Shepard?

  Great, great, great.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  So the sleep sets are awesome because they are very soft and comfortable, but they're cute. If I'm in my sleep set, I feel fine about going down the street to pick up my food. I'm still looking cute, but I'm comfy and I'm cozy.

• 1:09:22Dax Shepard?

  Roger.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  A really fun thing to do is if you're going on vacation with your girlfriends to get matching Skims pajamas. I've done this with Callie and it is so fun. First of all, the pics are so cute, but also it's just fun and friendship.

• 1:09:36Dax Shepard?

  So a girl's girl is looking out for your friends with better loungewear. I get it. Am I one of your girls now?

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  You are. You and the other girlies can shop my favorite loungewear and pajamas at skims.com. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you. Select podcasts in the survey and be sure to select our show in the dropdown menu that follows.

• 1:09:55Dax Shepard?

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• 1:11:03Speaker 04

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• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  On the other side, all of our ingrained pleasures can be hijacked and we can feed them really empty calorie versions of it, right? It's like I'm evolved to like sugar and someone can offer me Skittles. And I think a lot of our culture is basically like the empty calorie version of that retributive pleasure.

• 1:11:45Dax Shepard?

  Well, again, we evolved to overconsume because when we found something in bloom, we were smart to overconsume, get some fat reserves, because we would go long periods without. So now we live in a time of abundance where we have to imply morals on top of it.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12:00Dax Shepard?

  I felt this so acutely last week, and I was aware of it. I'm watching the new Game of Thrones show, A Knight in the Seven Kingdoms. Have you watched it?

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:12:09Dax Shepard?

  Did you watch the first Game of Thrones? Okay, so then you've already experienced this in Game of Thrones, which is there's a battle scene and there's a guy we fucking hate. And there was a moment where our hero was making the bad guy suffer. And we were watching it with two friends and me and the other guy were going, "Let's go, boys!" Like, the elation of,

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:12:31Dax Shepard?

  "Make this motherfucker pay" was so visceral and I was aware of it. I'm like, "Look at this thing." But then again, if you think evolutionarily, someone who is a threat to the group, is a threat to the group, so if they are eliminated, there should be elation. The big threat to the group is gone.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  There's other studies where it's like, at what point in time will children pay tokens or give up stickers or pay their money in order to see someone who's been portrayed as taking a ball away from a child, see them hit with a club?

• 1:13:00Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  And it's like, by the time they're, I think, five, they're like, "Here are my stickers." You know, people pay to see those movies. So there's something so fundamental there with that retributive instinct. And then the question is, what do we do with that? Are we going to give ourselves all the Skittles we want because it feels really good? How do we recognize that that has evolved for a reason? Exactly as you say, because we're social animals that are trying to enforce cooperative norms. There's no cooperative system that doesn't have enforcement. Without leaning into that, so that primal retributive urge is the only thing that's like running the show.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  And if you have a theology that says, "Justice is making people suffer eternally, in torment, in a lake of fire." And then you have this dopaminergic response to seeing a wrongdoer suffer and you let both of those run the show.

• 1:13:57Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  You know, I think you end up with the system that we have now, which is, not just how do we protect people from themselves so that they can't do any more harm? How do we protect other people from them? But how do we make them hurt?

• 1:14:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  Maximally. And not everywhere in the world does that. We have examples of doing differently and those are really instructive. And what if we keep the impulse behind the pleasure, which is we need to keep each other safe, without just doubling down on this juice of retribution?

• 1:14:28Dax Shepard?

  I agree with you. We're always gonna have to step over our evolutionary bias. We're gonna have to... Constantly confront these things that were serving us at one time, but now don't serve us. And we gotta have tools in place. And I think that's weirdly the great tension of living in this modern world.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  But also the great opportunity. I mean, I think that humans' superpower is our ability to flexibly decide how to live with each other. I mean, back to the anthropological perspective, there are so many different ways that we have ordered our lives and ordered, what are we gonna do about the fact that we are messy imperfect people who have to live with other messy imperfect people? There's a lot of ingenuity and creativity that I also think is baked into being human. And so that's really encouraging to like, okay, well, what is the reimagining that people are doing or that we could do around this?

• 1:15:23Dax Shepard?

  Because our systems are aspirational, they're what we hope to act as a collective conscious.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:15:29Dax Shepard?

  They should be virtuous.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  We can aim to be better in our institutions than we are in our worst moments.

• 1:15:35Dax Shepard?

  That's right. And so when we evaluate some of our current institutions, they're operating very, however you'd say.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  Retributively.

• 1:15:45Dax Shepard?

  Retributively.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  I love that you also, I also read things and I never hear them pronounced. And then I had to talk about the book and I'm like, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.

• 1:15:55Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I want to talk about, well, first of all, I would urge people to go watch, you gave a lecture to, I think it was at college. And it just was, I feel like made directly for me because you break down Hank Williams Jr.'s family tradition.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Oh, Brain Bar. It's like an ideas festival in Hungary. And there were so many young people there just going to hear talks.

• 1:16:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I loved it. And in there, you talk about, again, to counter the determinist point of view, what an ingenious study. I can't believe they have the technology to do this. But they have done studies where they make a dozen genetically identical rats. Will you talk about that?

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's so many different approaches to this, where you're looking at genetically identical animals.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Who were raised in identical conditions and then seeing, this is, I think, back to your fundamental unpredictability of complex systems. If you have the same nature and the same nurture, to the extent that we can measure, does that mean you're necessarily going to act in the exact same way? And the answer is no. Your behavior will be similar, but it won't be identical. So some of this is looking at inbred mice, where they're basically in a controlled breeding population, they're all very, very genetically similar. There's also studies of armadillos, because armadillos always give birth to four identical quadruplet armadillos. Wow. And then there's what is known as clonal fish, who are genetically highly homogeneous. Oh, I won't leave out this one. There's also studies of cloned pets.

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  So in Texas, there was a study of, there was a couple that was very attached to their pet bull. And so they had him cloned, Chance and Second Chance. So all of these are genetically identical. So in all of these studies, you're looking at, if you have the same genotype, and if you were raised in a similar or identical environment, are you behaving in the exact same way? So Chance was a very docile bull. Second Chance gored his owners, I think, twice.

• 1:17:54Dax Shepard?

  Maybe even more. When they were doing this American Life episode, they were interviewing him, I think, for the third time in the hospital where he had been gored the owner. And he said he's not giving up on him. But Chance is a little different, because Chance came to them late.

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they don't know the initial.

• 1:18:09Dax Shepard?

  But the rats, when you put them together, that's fascinating.

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. So in this case, it's mice. What they did is they have inbred mice, so they're all genetically very similar. And then they raised them in identical cages with identical food and identical handling, identical temperatures. And then at a certain point, they put them all together in these big mouse vivariums. And see what happens. And there's digital sensors everywhere so they can see, you know, which mouse is moving where, when. And what you see is the emergence of mouse personality. Individual differences in which mice are dominating the exits and the access to food, which ones are moving around a lot, which ones are aggressing,

• 1:18:53Speaker 02

  which ones are very inhibited and don't want to come out when it's light. And you can explain it with genotype. And you can't explain it with the cages that they were raised in. There's an unpredictable individuality to behavior. That's neither one of those. And there's no way at a certain point for humans to have the same environment because we are each other's environments. As soon as they got in a social group, there was no way for every mouse to have the same thing because they had each other. And these initial tiny differences in how that first interaction went. And that could be initially chance, but then life builds on chance.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  There's a path dependence to those initial things. My colleague at UT also does these studies where he has mice in a vivarium and they establish a dominance hierarchy. And then he plucks the alpha mouse out and sees the power scramble that happens. And one thing that makes the alpha mouse is he pisses everywhere. He's like constantly peeing all the time. And so you see immediately genes involved in drinking water. So that like it make pee, like get turned on within minutes of this. And so the plasticity of the nervous system to respond to social cues is amazing. And that's a mouse. Think about how much more complicated it is than a person.

• 1:20:18Speaker 02

  Sometimes what I tell my students is that if you're looking at a tapestry, if you're looking at a piece of fabric, like you would never ask, which is more important, the threads that go this way or this way? Right? They're woven together and that is what constitutes the fabric. It is nature and nurture being woven together. And the interface for that is often the epigenome that constitutes the developing person.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  When we talk about how we can maybe make some changes where we still have accountability, but maybe not this really punitive nature behind it, don't you think in order to do that, everyone has to see this as an issue?

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  And I don't think they do. I don't think people are upset that people are punitive. Some of us are, but I think people like that there's-

• 1:21:06Dax Shepard?

  Well, they were designed to, as we, you know.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Right. So like, I don't see how, how to-

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  That's such a good question. And honestly, I think it's such an important question now. What we're living through politically, where people are being hurt on the streets, and then other people are cheering for it. What is that other than identifying with the punisher? Identifying with the person that's like, "I'm bringing the pain", and then inventing a class of wrongdoers to justify it? I think we're used to thinking of their sins and then we get punished for our sins. But I've come to think of it as retribution can also be a sin in that it is another really primitive aspect of our biology

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  that gives us pleasure, that we can indulge in and overindulge in, and indulge in regardless of how much it's hurting other people. Gosh, I wish I had a good answer for that question. How do you convince people that it's a problem to want to hurt-

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  Other people or yourself?

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  It's tough.

• 1:22:10Dax Shepard?

  In that lecture, you were asked this, it turned over to the audience a bunch, and most people were along the same path. And I think probably a lot of people listening will have this thought, which is, okay, if we've identified this suite of genes, and we're entering into an era where either gene editing is more realistic, perhaps the epigenome, they're erasing chunks of it. In mice, you have people who are about to do IVF can look at the embryo. I think people will be curious to know what you think about embracing these genes or wanting to eliminate these genes.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have so many thoughts about this. I'm so glad you asked this question. Okay, so the first thing is, going back to, all of these behaviors are, in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases- Massively polygenic. So they're influenced by thousands upon thousands of tiny genetic variants that have a tiny effect. And the implication of that for gene editing is that we're not going to be gene editing a twentieth of your genome to make you slightly less risk-taking. So I think the applications for CRISPR-Cas9, which is our technology for gene editing, is going to be monogenic disorders. Like you have sickle cell.

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  Brenner syndrome is an example of serious antisocial behavior caused by one gene. The technological question that we're going to have to grapple with is not going to be gene editing, it's going to be genetic selection. And so that's a technique in which people create IVF embryos. They might do this because they have fertility challenges and they were going to do IVF anyways, but increasingly, there's marketing doing this electively. So you could conceive the old-fashioned way, but you choose to conceive by creating a lot of IVF embryos. And then genetically testing those embryos, there's what people already test embryos for. Is there an aneuploidy, like Down syndrome or Trisomy 18?

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  Is there a monogenic disorder? And then looking at a polygenic score. So this would be your genetically predicted likelihood of that embryo eventually developing a substance use disorder, or eventually scoring very highly on an IQ test. And this is not science fiction. There are ads in the New York subway right now that say, "Have your best baby."

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  And it is an ad for pre-implantation genetic testing of embryos. What I think is really important for people to know about this is, one, these genetic risk scores that we've developed, I've developed, other people have developed, they are not crystal balls. For the reasons we've been talking about, I can say that your probability of something is higher or lower, but that's totally different than, say, like Huntington's disease, where if you have this gene, you're going to get the disorder. So there's a uncertainty around the estimates that I don't think often comes through in the marketing for these techniques.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  The second thing is, the science is... Most applicable when it's applied to people who are genetically similar to the samples in the original research. And most of those people are Northern Europeans. Right. So, anyone who comes from a different part of the globe, virtue of having less genetic similarity to Norwegians or white British people from the UK, those estimates are going to work much less well, or maybe not at all. And there's no ads on the subway being like, have your best baby only if you're genetically similar to people from Northern Europe. Yeah. Right? Like, that's not part of the advertisement around this.

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  And then the third thing is genes don't do just one thing. They're involved in lots of things, and there's no gene for risk-taking. And I have this thought experiment in my book, and I say, imagine if we had some eugenic dictator, and they said, no one gets to reproduce the old-fashioned way. Everyone's going to do IVF-created embryos, polygenic selection. And we are only going to select the embryos that have the least risk-taking genes. And we're going to repeat that so that in every generation, we are only getting the most inhibited, puritanical, not risk-taking, not likely to use substances.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  Separate from a terrible dystopian lack of freedom. Do we actually want to live in a world in which no one has that?

• 1:26:45Dax Shepard?

  Thank you. Your last point is the one that I believe in strongest, which is, the nature of your study is, we have criminal data, we have genetic data. We do not have data of overachieving, writing prowess. These are things that are hard to measure.

• 1:27:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:02Dax Shepard?

  So, one that I love is, I grew up learning dyslexia made you twice as likely to end up in jail. But over time, what we've learned is dyslexia also makes you two to three times more likely to be a CEO. Addiction, how many of our writers are addicts? How many of our poets? How many of our musicians?

• 1:27:19Speaker 02

  We have data on that.

• 1:27:20Dax Shepard?

  We're only looking at the pathological side. This is the inherent problem with the DSM, is we've observed these pathologies. But we're not really shining a light on, well, what's the upside of it?

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Dax Shepard?

  There might be more upside than there is downside. This is a trade off situation. So we're coming up with, quote, "normal," and we're going to lose all this diversity. And then you will have determinism.

• 1:27:41Speaker 02

  Variety is necessary to the richness of human experience. And I totally agree with you. I mean, if we look at who is most likely to be a successful entrepreneur by the age of 30? We can see this in the data. It's people who have social privilege, white, men, from middle to upper income families. And then men who experimented with substances and had a little bit too much sex and engaged in low level delinquent behavior when they were teenagers. And what is that? That's risk tolerance. And society needs people who are very aware of risks and potential negative consequences. But we also need people who are willing to go for it and are more risk tolerant. I think that everyone's strength can also be their weakness. But also, everyone's weakness can also be their superpower.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  I mean, there'll be no technological developments. There'll probably be no art. There would be so many things missing.

• 1:28:33Dax Shepard?

  Freeze right here.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  There's another study where they look at people who are very high on genetic risk scores for schizophrenia, which, again, people can select against now in their embryos. If they're not patients with schizophrenia, they're more likely to be artists. They're more likely to be musicians. They're more likely to be in creative professions.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  Oh, God, that's so hard, though.

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  If you think about a distribution, and the top 1% is this. But this zone, in the like 75th to 99th zone, are the people who are having so much imagination and openness to new experience. How can you say that gene is a good gene or a bad gene? It's all of the above.

• 1:29:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  I have a chapter in my book about this. It's called "Variety." And it ends with this observation from Durkheim, who's a founding sociologist. And he had a paper where he said, "Some level of crime is necessary to society because a crimeless society is one in which everyone thinks about things exactly the same and no one has any differences in moral imagination." And if we look back in time, many of the people we now think of as moral pioneers. Were criminalized in their time. So I don't want to underplay. Serious antisocial behavior has costs. It hurts people. But I don't think that we can sin then say, so let's get rid of the genes.

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  People can do bad things, but that doesn't mean the genes are bad genes. Because those genes are doing many different things in the human body. Diversity is grist for evolution. There's no evolution without mutation. There's no evolution without diversity.

• 1:30:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, Galileo was a criminal.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  Socrates, Jesus.

• 1:30:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, a lot of criminals.

• 1:30:18Speaker 02

  Gandhi.

• 1:30:19Dax Shepard?

  Okay, Original Sin, On the Genetics of Vice, The Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. Radical book. I do applaud and love how personal and memoir-y it is.

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  Thank you for saying that.

• 1:30:32Dax Shepard?

  In addition to being chock full of yummy scientific research.

• 1:30:35Speaker 02

  I appreciate that.

• 1:30:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's wonderful. Thank you so much for coming. Everyone, check out Original Sin. I hope you'll come back when you have another book.

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  I would love to. Thank you for having me. This was a delight.

• 1:30:45Dax Shepard?

  Oh, good.

• 1:30:49Dax Shepard?

  We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some host eggs.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  Rob brought us coffees today. So nice.

• 1:31:01Dax Shepard?

  Very exciting and nice.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:31:04Dax Shepard?

  Excited by it, and I think it's nice.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  I agree. And because, as you know, are we recording, Rob? As you know, I... Oh, wow, okay.

• 1:31:15Dax Shepard?

  Well, because we talked about it.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  For the listener, Dax is wearing his sunglasses that he just got that he's obsessed with.

• 1:31:21Dax Shepard?

  The aforementioned sunglasses.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  From a previous episode. Go find it if you missed it.

• 1:31:25Dax Shepard?

  Do you ever watch people at like award shows who wear sunglasses and they pull it off? I'm a little jealous of them. I know people would be like, what are you doing? I can't pull it at all. Similar to how you're feeling right now, you know?

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  It's not about pulling it off. It's just like, oh, why?

• 1:31:43Dax Shepard?

  Because it's a nice little safety blanket.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:31:46Dax Shepard?

  You know? It's like a little armor for people.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  If you started doing it, I think people might be like...

• 1:31:51Dax Shepard?

  He relapsed.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that would be like the number one.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  They'd say that first.

• 1:31:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, this guy's high.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  I'm losing my touch because I hadn't even thought about that. Don't, I don't get any ideas. And then two, I think they'd be like, oh, he has an eye issue.

• 1:32:07Dax Shepard?

  Astye, um, pink eye, glaucoma, macular degeneration. Now, another pair that I have, just look how gorgeous these are. Um, the other pair I have are black frames, but they're kind of a light pink lens. And that, I think I can wear inside because it really kind of looks like a reading glass.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  Okay, and so you're, you're interested in wearing them inside?

• 1:32:33Dax Shepard?

  I don't know what it is about these. I prefer to just be in them.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:32:39Dax Shepard?

  Isn't that something?

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz I don't think you're the type.

• 1:32:43Dax Shepard?

  I don't like them.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  No, I just don't think you're the type that needs like a shield. You're just not really that type.

• 1:32:51Dax Shepard?

  That's totally.

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  You really put yourself out. You're the opposite of someone who's, who's needing a shield.

• 1:32:57Dax Shepard?

  That's fair. Yeah, I think, um, like there are people with a lot, a lot more social anxiety.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:04Dax Shepard?

  But I will say, I've had moments at those things where it's like, either I want to look around in rubber neck.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:33:11Dax Shepard?

  But I don't want to be caught doing that.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  Okay, hold on, put your glasses on.

• 1:33:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay. If they're going, for the listener, they're going back on.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  They're going back on for the listener. Now, I want Dex to look at, like, you're trying to look at somebody, okay? And I'm gonna see if I see what you're doing.

• 1:33:22Dax Shepard?

  I'm also highly lit from the front because of the nature of the studio.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  You're looking that way. Oh, and you're making sexy faces.

• 1:33:30Dax Shepard?

  The old, old yellow chair.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is a sexy chair.

• 1:33:33Dax Shepard?

  But I thought you couldn't see me.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  I know. I'm moving your mouth.

• 1:33:37Dax Shepard?

  My whole eyebrow.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:33:38Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  So I tend to walk and travel, even when I drove here way back when.

• 1:33:46Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  I don't take to-go cups. I just bring my mug open carry.

• 1:33:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that you're calling it open carry cuz that is.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  That is what it is. It's illegal if there's alcohol in here, but there's not. It's just tea. Uh, and I saw on Instagram someone writing about people like me who open carry their coffee.

• 1:34:06Dax Shepard?

  They have an opinion about that.

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they said those people have chaotic energies.

• 1:34:11Dax Shepard?

  Mmm.

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  And I wonder what you think about that.

• 1:34:15Dax Shepard?

  Well, I bet what they're inferring is that someone has scrambled to leave the house.

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  Mmm.

• 1:34:20Dax Shepard?

  And they didn't either have time to transfer it to a to-go.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:34:25Dax Shepard?

  Travel mug. Or they're just like so spaghetti wampus leaving, they don't even know it's in their hand.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:31Dax Shepard?

  I don't, I don't think I would lead to any of those conclusions, but I see the logic underlying the theory.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Well, they said um that it, it reads chaotic energy, just truly deeply, I don't give a fuck.

• 1:34:45Dax Shepard?

  So kind of cool as well?

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Well, that, yeah, it ended up being a positive review of these types of people.

• 1:34:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  Me, which I appreciated, but also like, I don't think it means I don't give a fuck. It actually means there's no to-go mugs that are as cute as my mugs.

• 1:35:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you, you're a mug collector.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, connoisseur.

• 1:35:04Dax Shepard?

  A curator of mugs, yeah.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  So it's, it's actually more about that, mixed with rats, rats and water bottles.

• 1:35:12Dax Shepard?

  Now you're afraid to have a clothes.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:35:14Dax Shepard?

  Clothes carry.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  I just don't think you can ever get those that clean.

• 1:35:18Dax Shepard?

  And I do hate, in fact, this is one, I, I have these little annoying habits as a family member. I think I do a lot of the dishes.

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:35:27Dax Shepard?

  And I, they drink from, my family members drink from certain water bottles.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:33Dax Shepard?

  That are impossible to clean.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  I know, I, yeah.

• 1:35:36Dax Shepard?

  And, and I do get a little, I will clean like 600 dishes and I will sometimes leave these two or three things. Cause I'm like, they can't be clean, it's, if you want to drink out of this impossible to clean thing, you gotta clean it.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  I'm with you.

• 1:35:48Dax Shepard?

  I get a little stubborn about that. And I should just clean them and most of the time I do just clean them and I like myself more if I just clean them.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:35:55Dax Shepard?

  But I am annoyed when someone makes a choice, it's gonna be harder for me.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hate that about life.

• 1:36:02Dax Shepard?

  I could make a whole Greek tragedy about the dumb little tiny wars that go on in a house, in a family.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  Silent war.

• 1:36:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, another one that's going on, which is hysterical is Kristen's very, very conscious of microplastics.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:18Dax Shepard?

  I have surrendered to that they're everywhere, right? Cause I'm not even gonna try. And so there's two different kinds of paper plates. One is covered in a little bit, I would have thought like some kind of a wax. You know the type.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do.

• 1:36:29Dax Shepard?

  And then there's just the raw paper ones.

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  The one you're talking about is classic. It's what most people are eating off of.

• 1:36:36Dax Shepard?

  And it is covered, I think, in a thin layer of plastic.

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  It has goo.

• 1:36:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, um, and if you don't use it and you put like a steak on it, all the sauce gets absorbed into the paper.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  If you use a natural kind, yeah.

• 1:36:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, or anything you would have with moisture. Once you put it on there, it just sucks it out like a sponge. So I can't stand those plates.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:36:55Dax Shepard?

  Uh, if I were having like a piece of toast, fine.

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:58Dax Shepard?

  But I generally feel like I'm putting something with some moisture.

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  Gravy toss.

• 1:37:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and so there's two different stacks of them.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:37:08Dax Shepard?

  Basically his and hers.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:37:09Dax Shepard?

  And this battle of which one's on top. So it's like, I had seen the paper ones and in my mind, I'm like, none of us like those paper ones except for you. The kids and I like this other one. So I put that on top. And then I noticed, then I came in the cupboard and I noticed there were her big stack of raw ones, my stack of plastic covered ones, and then now a new stack of paper.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  Different kind?

• 1:37:31Dax Shepard?

  No, the ones that were on the bottom, but now we've just added.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  Sandwiched.

• 1:37:34Dax Shepard?

  Kind of like the game you play where you put a hand on top of each other and you're like, and I was like, oh my God, this is hysterical. Look at us like working out this plate thing.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 1:37:42Dax Shepard?

  In the cabinet.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:37:44Dax Shepard?

  Make, make, both making our adjustments. And then I was like, I mean, the solution here is a two-state system, like.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Two separate stacks.

• 1:37:51Dax Shepard?

  There should be two different stacks, but somehow we've designated one area for stacking the paper plates.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  I have a, I have an, uh, detailed question. It does matter though.

• 1:37:59Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Are the plates the same size?

• 1:38:01Dax Shepard?

  They are, which they generally aren't. So that becomes another issue.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, because if, if they're not the same size, I think Feng Shui.

• 1:38:10Dax Shepard?

  The smaller diameter should go on top.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:38:13Dax Shepard?

  And by the way, we're in an interesting phase right now because somehow they're the same size. But, but traditionally, historically, the plastic covered ones are a little bit smaller.

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:38:22Dax Shepard?

  And then when I see the bigger ones teetering on top, I'm like, it makes me feel uncomfortable. And then you add in my, um, just wanting to use those plates. But all these hilarious little subtle quiet dramas that are going on in households. Is, is really funny. Or another one is, and I found that this is kind of a common thing that happens in marriages and it tends to also line up gender-wise. I cannot stand the dishwasher. My take on the dishwasher is you have to wash it to put it in the dishwasher. And people are like, no, you don't.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't.

• 1:38:54Dax Shepard?

  And then I'm constantly pulling things out of the dishwasher that need to be re-washed, particularly silverware. I'll find a knife and I'm like, someone needed to scrub that before you put it in there. The dishwasher's not gonna scrub. So it's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna clean it, right? And then I mean, they're gonna go put it, bend down and put it in this box that I then have to go later and bend down and pick it out of the box.

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  I hear you.

• 1:39:15Dax Shepard?

  Or just put it on the drying rack. To me, there's an extra step.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:39:19Dax Shepard?

  And it's this endless battle and everyone, you know, the people that are in the dishwasher camp think they get the dishes clean enough. I don't. It seems like an extra step. I'm like, just wash the damn thing and be done with it.

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  Can I, can I input here?

• 1:39:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Oh, I gotta add one more grievance.

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:39:33Dax Shepard?

  What also happens is in my circle, a lot of the people that prefer the dishwasher, they want it to be full to run it. Cause they don't wanna waste. And that's admirable. But what ends up happening is the things everyone uses a lot end up in there and then you're out of, it's always the bowls are gone, we're out of bowls, and then we're out of fucking silverware. Now I gotta go into the washer and re-wash the whole thing.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  That part, I get.

• 1:39:56Dax Shepard?

  To use.

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  I get that.

• 1:39:57Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so I bear all my grievance.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  Now, I want, I wanna weigh in on the dishwasher, cause I have a very, very rare and unique perspective.

• 1:40:08Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  Okay? So I grew up as dishwasher being the, my chore, like loading and unloading.

• 1:40:15Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  And I hated it so much. And I fucking hated the dishwasher and it was my nemesis.

• 1:40:24Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:25Speaker 01

  Then I have lived without a dishwasher.

• 1:40:29Dax Shepard?

  In the last 15 years.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  Yes. And I started to hate myself. Like, I hated not having it. Having to wash every dish was so hard, especially when you're cooking. Cause then you have the big pots and pans and the little dishes. And, and then if you're, if you're cooking for a lot of people, oh my God, that, that I started to just, I would walk into the kitchen after everyone left and I would just look around and I was like, I, I'm walking out.

• 1:41:00Dax Shepard?

  I gotta move out.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't, I'm burning this place down. I don't know what to do. I mean, hours, hours.

• 1:41:06Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure, sure, sure.

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  Um, so now.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  Back full circle. I have my di- I have a dishwasher and I've had one for a month.

• 1:41:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  And I love it.

• 1:41:17Dax Shepard?

  You love it.

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:41:19Dax Shepard?

  And you just pitch a bunch of dirty dishes in there?

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  I put clean ones in there just for fun.

• 1:41:23Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  No, I, I, yeah, I use it. I don't mind loading and unloading.

• 1:41:29Dax Shepard?

  Do you wash the stuff before you put it in?

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Rinse. I do, I, you, you have to rinse it.

• 1:41:33Dax Shepard?

  What if there's cheese stuck to like a knife or a fork?

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  You gotta get that off, but you just push that off.

• 1:41:39Dax Shepard?

  You can scrub it with a, a, a, a sponge.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  I've never, I, I don't scrub anything with the sponge before it goes in. I do rinse it and sometimes I'll use my hand to like get something hard off of it.

• 1:41:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:51Speaker 01

  But I don't do any scrubbies.

• 1:41:53Dax Shepard?

  My breakfast every single morning, as you know, is oatmeal. Bob's trusted brands, two scoops of protein. Everything's sticky. Protein is sticky, oatmeal's sticky. If I were to rinse that bowl off, forget it. All that stuff would be stuck to it after the dishwasher. And then the spoon itself is also covered with very sticky stuff between the oatmeal and the protein powder. It's like sticky. So I have to wash it with a scrubby sponge to put it in the dishwasher, but at the point, it's clean.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  Well, hold on. Can you just put it in the sink?

• 1:42:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  Put the hot water a- immediately. Like you finish, you put it in the sink, hot water in the bowl, then you leave, right? So it's sitting.

• 1:42:32Dax Shepard?

  No. Well, first of all, no, then we might have dishes soaking all over. That's unacceptable. You have a bunch of stagnant water. Mosquitoes may lay their eggs in there.

• 1:42:41Dax Shepard?

  It will not just fall out. It, it's gonna require scrubbing, period, because it's that sticky. The, this, it's like a cement.

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:42:49Dax Shepard?

  Okay. I'm gonna have another thing. That'll just make me vomit. It's, yeah, it was when you were talking about cooking. So, and I'm recognizing like what a, I'm so terrible.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  It sounds very controlled.

• 1:42:59Dax Shepard?

  I'm sorry, yes, this is like the most type A side of my personality and it's probably terrible. My kink. My proclivity.

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:43:07Dax Shepard?

  And I keep waiting for someone to notice now for 20 years and no one's ever noticed. When I cook my big spaghetti dinner, it's involved. There's lots of pots and pans. What I pride myself on is that I'm cleaning while I go. And then by the time I put the stuff on the table, there's no dishes.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:43:23Dax Shepard?

  And I'm waiting for someone to clap their hands for me.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  You say it all the time.

• 1:43:28Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm trying to get my kids and I was like. You can clean while you're cooking and then you don't have this big thing to do. Cause there's all these five minutes downtime when you're cooking, right? I gotta let that simmer for this. Well, that's a great time to clean this.

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  Trust me, I know all.

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  Natalie and I fight about that all the time.

• 1:43:43Dax Shepard?

  Cleaning while you go?

• 1:43:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:46Dax Shepard?

  And you're a what? Clean while you go guy?

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, cause we're cooking together.

• 1:43:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  Listen.

• 1:43:51Dax Shepard?

  We should move in together, Rob.

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  Everyone wants to be slash tries to be a clean while you go person, okay? Normally if I'm making, like when I make month's giving.

• 1:44:03Dax Shepard?

  Yep.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  For most of it, I'm cleaning while I'm going. I'm like, oh my God, this is great. And I don't have any dishes. I don't have any dishes. All of a sudden at the end, when things are.

• 1:44:12Dax Shepard?

  The system breaks down. It backs up.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  All of a sudden you have so much crap and like.

• 1:44:16Dax Shepard?

  There's a logger jam somewhere in the system.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  You can do about it. Then even if you do, even if you clean completely while you go.

• 1:44:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  Then you serve everyone.

• 1:44:25Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  All the dishes that had the food are dirty. All the dishes that people are eating off are dirty. The utensils, it's dirty again. Immediately there's so much to do.

• 1:44:35Dax Shepard?

  There is, but then why add in all of the heavy duty stuff, the cutting board, the knives?

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  No, I agree.

• 1:44:40Dax Shepard?

  Scrubbing that you gotta do.

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  Cleaning while you go is definitely the way, but you can't and.

• 1:44:45Dax Shepard?

  We're making a meal, pun intended, out of this, but of course now you just, so spaghetti is a great example. I'll watch Kristen warm up a plate of spaghetti bolognese on those raw paper plates. And I'm like, oh my God, how could you do this?

• 1:45:01Speaker 01

  Well, cause you're worried about the.

• 1:45:03Dax Shepard?

  Absorbent. It's like a sauce.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:06Dax Shepard?

  And then those things are like thick with saturated spaghetti sauce. It's almost gonna break through the bottom. It's so waterlogged.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  She loves it.

• 1:45:16Dax Shepard?

  She loves it and she's doing just fine. And she did fine before me.

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:45:20Dax Shepard?

  And she would do fine after me. You gotta constantly tell yourself this.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  Everyone's so different. I mean, even, cause you put. Your paper plates in the microwave.

• 1:45:30Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, love it.

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't put any paper in the microwave.

• 1:45:34Dax Shepard?

  Why?

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  I'm against that.

• 1:45:36Dax Shepard?

  Tell me why.

• 1:45:37Speaker 01

  Um, similar, well, sort of similar to what you're saying, like, then it's like in the plate. And even though it has that goo, I just don't like what ends up happening.

• 1:45:48Dax Shepard?

  Well, you probably shouldn't microwave the kind of paper plates I use, because that's probably when you get a lot of leaching.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  That's also part of it. I'm like, I don't think this paper's supposed to be heated up like this. So I, I heat glass.

• 1:46:01Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  Um, and ceramic.

• 1:46:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  But everyone's different is all, all I'm saying.

• 1:46:08Dax Shepard?

  Absolutely. And also, like, another thing I'm aware of is like, we all think we don't waste. Or like, we all have a commitment, and, but what I realize is, it's like, it's such specific categories.

• 1:46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:21Dax Shepard?

  Um, like Kristen's really, really dedicated and great at not wasting.

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, she cares a lot about that.

• 1:46:27Dax Shepard?

  But then there are these things that I don't waste on, and I realize, oh, she's wasting up a storm. So like,

• 1:46:34Dax Shepard?

  as good as you think you are, there's just stuff you don't even see.

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  You would hate living with me. I waste so much. And I don't, I don't care, and I think it's, yeah.

• 1:46:44Dax Shepard?

  You don't have any kind of ethical hangover?

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  No, and actually, my parents were just here. I, I am, but I wonder if it's because my parents care a lot about waste.

• 1:46:54Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh, and you're rebelling?

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  I think it's their frugality, and like, even so, my mom-

• 1:46:59Dax Shepard?

  That's kind of what I'm stuck with, is the like, trying to get way too many uses out of things.

• 1:47:03Speaker 01

  Yes, and I, I think I've rebelled, because I'm just like, oh, I didn't, my parents were here when my farm box came.

• 1:47:11Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  I get a farm box once every two weeks.

• 1:47:13Dax Shepard?

  Delivery of produce, right?

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:14Dax Shepard?

  From the farmer's market.

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  Uh huh, and it's a one-person box, so there's not like that much stuff in it, but it's exciting, I love it.

• 1:47:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  And it came, and my, my dad was like, oh, cool, and then he was like, What are you gonna do with all this food? And I was like, well, I mean, I cook stuff. And he's like, well, all of it?

• 1:47:31Dax Shepard?

  I'm gonna eat thirty percent of it. What do you mean?

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:33Dax Shepard?

  What do you mean, am I gonna do it? I'm gonna eat a third of it.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  I was like, no, I either like, maybe I'll give it to someone or I'll throw it out. And then they hated that, you know? My mom made spaghetti one day.

• 1:47:44Dax Shepard?

  Really quick, did they hate? Because these are two much different categories. Did they hate that you're wasting your money? Or did they hate that the food's being wasted?

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  Both.

• 1:47:53Dax Shepard?

  Both?

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:54Dax Shepard?

  Double whammy.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:55Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  It's not even like, they're not thinking it through like, oh, wasted food because other kids don't have food. It's not like ethical like that.

• 1:48:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  It's just like, as sort of you would say, like, I'm not a good steward of things coming my way. I'm not like, oh, then how will I use this? Make this last for two weeks or whatever?

• 1:48:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:14Speaker 01

  You know, my mom made spaghetti one night. And then she was like, you know, then they were both obsessed with like, eating the spaghetti. When are we gonna eat the rest of the spaghetti? And when is it? And I was like, we're not gonna eat it. I'm gonna throw it away. Like, enough with this, like, you spending all your brain power on figuring out when to eat the leftover spaghetti on your vacation.

• 1:48:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I'm somewhere in the middle of you two.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. They're my parents. They're gonna like, anytime I spend my, like, any money, they're worried.

• 1:48:47Dax Shepard?

  They're probably still worrying about how you're gonna turn out. Like, I don't think a parent can turn that off. It's like, bitch, she turned out. She's thirty-eight. This is who she is. And I know I'll probably be fighting that with my own children. But it's like, at some point, you're like, there's no more, you know, how they're gonna turn out. They're out.

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  I know, but it's scary. It's scary when you have these little people walking around and living their lives. And they came out of your body. And they came out of your egg and your sperm. Like, it's too scary. Even, they left this morning.

• 1:49:20Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  And, you know, they were walking, they're just, they're just so funny. They just think everything through so many steps. You know, it's so like... My dad was like, okay, well, the Uber, I guess we'll just walk to the.

• 1:49:33Dax Shepard?

  He's probably worried about how they're gonna get in the gate.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, I was like, well, it's fine, cuz we'll just give them the code that calls my phone. He was like, yeah, but you're work, they have to call your phone. I was like, okay, whatever. Just, I guess, do whatever you're gonna do.

• 1:49:46Dax Shepard?

  Walk to the airport, man, just stop.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  I know. It's so, it's so funny. But yeah, so then they walked out of my house and they were walking to the gate.

• 1:49:55Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  And waiting for the Uber there. I heard, you know, he was walking, and I heard somebody else walking up. And I heard him say to my parents, do you live here? And they, and then my dad said, no, our daughter lives here.

• 1:50:10Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh, that's so cute.

• 1:50:15Dax Shepard?

  That is. But think how funny they looked walking through our neighborhood with rolling bags.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  I know. I know. But like, I thought that was.

• 1:50:25Dax Shepard?

  They really don't look like robbers. They could be carrying television sets out of a house, and I would not think they were robbers.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  They're the opposite of robbers, look wise. They'd be great. In that way, they'd be great robbers.

• 1:50:38Dax Shepard?

  Jewel heists.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, it's cute, it's cute to have parents who care about their daughters and their sons.

• 1:50:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  It's really sweet. But also, I'm like, I'm throwing out the spaghetti. Yeah.

• 1:50:51Dax Shepard?

  I'm gonna throw everything away.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  Speaking of daughters, you wanted to tell me something.

• 1:50:55Dax Shepard?

  Oh, just that I had a dream day with Lincoln. She had the day off of school. And so I said, what, what's, what do you think about going out to the beach?

• 1:51:06Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:51:06Dax Shepard?

  And riding bikes along the strand, the paved bike path.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  Santa Monica?

• 1:51:11Dax Shepard?

  In Santa Monica, which, if you don't live here, I would imagine you'd think, well, people must go out to the beach a lot. You don't. It's very far.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  Unless you live there.

• 1:51:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's like an hour drive, generally, even though it's 18 miles away. So, yeah, we loaded up the bikes in the truck and we went, and we rode bikes for like, I don't know, six, seven miles.

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:51:32Dax Shepard?

  We got to look at some of the fire damage in the Palisades. You can see it from the bike path. And then we went to my very favorite restaurant from when I lived there for 10 years. Uh, Freedom Misto and sat down inside and ordered. I tried to talk her into the pink sauce. She didn't want it, but then my pink sauce came, she had it. And we got a side of pink sauce and we fixed it. But um, yeah, she actually loved it, which is great. Cause most of these things I share with them, that I'm so excited to share with them, they could take it or leave it, you know?

• 1:52:04Speaker 01

  Ouch.

• 1:52:05Dax Shepard?

  You're also doing this thing and I'm aware of it, but I still do it, which is like, I want them to, I guess it's, I probably, I just want them to be interested in me. As a person independent of, right?

• 1:52:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:17Dax Shepard?

  And so, like when we were getting off at the, uh, of the highway, or right before we got off, I was like, oh, that was my exit for 10 years.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:52:27Dax Shepard?

  Of course she.

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  She doesn't care.

• 1:52:29Dax Shepard?

  She's a giver shit. And I was like, even as I'm saying this stuff, I'm like, she doesn't even care.

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  Did she say, oh, did she pretend?

• 1:52:36Dax Shepard?

  She like feigns, but I, I know, I know. I've just been trying, like my dad told me he got off an exit, but I wouldn't care. That's just the nature of.

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  Is it? Okay. I don't know.

• 1:52:46Dax Shepard?

  Well, so it culminates in, I never, I'm rarely in Santa Monica, but I did live there for a decade. We leave Freedom Misto and of course I always have to drive by my old apartment. I can't go to Santa Monica now. We were in a hurry to beat traffic and I was like, I'm turning, I'm turning right on you, Fred. I gotta, I gotta look at it.

• 1:53:02Speaker 01

  Wow, okay, okay.

• 1:53:04Dax Shepard?

  Um, so we're driving, I don't even stop. I know better than to stop. Well, I would have liked to have stopped and stared at the building for five minutes. Think all these things, oh, that's where the gang came up my stairwell, that's.

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  Maybe that's what they're worried you're gonna start talking about. They're like, I don't wanna know about that.

• 1:53:21Dax Shepard?

  No, but um, we look at the place and, and also, okay, then the, the subversive thing I'm hoping trickles through is like, hey, we didn't always have money.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  Look how far we've come.

• 1:53:33Dax Shepard?

  And look how I lived for a decade.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:35Dax Shepard?

  And, and you may have to live that way for a decade too, you know? There's some, and that, maybe they won't, whatever.

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  We know they won't. We just have to be realistic, right?

• 1:53:47Dax Shepard?

  I don't know. I could definitely see Lincoln having the same pride that I had, which is, I can see her deciding, no, no, no, I wanna have my own place, and she wants the pride of it being her own place and her pay for it.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can see that.

• 1:54:01Dax Shepard?

  That's very foreseeable for her.

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  I could a hundred percent see that.

• 1:54:04Dax Shepard?

  And in which case, it'll be something similar to the thing we're looking at.

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, but don't you think, and maybe this is not, maybe this isn't true, I don't know, and there's no way for us to know. But I feel like

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  there is a difference when you know at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, you can call your parents and you can get some help. By the way, I have that, I had that.

• 1:54:27Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  I was working at SoulCycle, I did not, I was making thirty dollars an hour, it was tight, it was hard, but

• 1:54:34Dax Shepard?

  You weren't panicked.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  I wasn't, I, I was, like, I was stressed a lot, but I wasn't, like, deeply in my soul panicked because I knew at the end of the day, one, they could probably help me in a jam.

• 1:54:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  And two, I always go back there if I had to. I could live in their basement if I had to, like, they, they could support me.

• 1:54:56Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  In that way, even though they told me over and over again, not, like, don't depend on that.

• 1:55:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  Like, we, we need, like, you know, they were trying to scare me, it didn't work, it didn't work.

• 1:55:06Dax Shepard?

  Well, why you come back? Well, you're not allowed to come back.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:55:09Dax Shepard?

  You need to proceed as if you can come back, but of course you can't come back.

• 1:55:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, you know, that, that's a little different, but I agree with you, I think she, I'm sure she'll want

• 1:55:16Dax Shepard?

  She's prideful in the same way I, I'm kinda prideful.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:55:20Dax Shepard?

  Um, so, but yeah, so we're just, and I'm also like, I'm, I'm aware, I'm like, she's just looking at a random building. Like, that building means so much to me, but that is just, there's no difference between that building and the one next door. It's just a building. And she did go, she gave me a like, oh wow, that's, that's pretty, like, cool that that, where you started and where we're at.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  That's nice.

• 1:55:41Dax Shepard?

  That was nice, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  And then she, like, looked up on her phone, like, it was a script.

• 1:55:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I was like, Chat GPT, what to say to your dad when he's trying to feel proud of himself and instill a lesson into you somehow?

• 1:55:53Speaker 01

  It's also probably, it's different because maybe in Michigan, if you're driving by your old house in Michigan, they probably will feel, they would feel different. It's some, they live here.

• 1:56:06Dax Shepard?

  Yep.

• 1:56:06Speaker 01

  I think that's different, probably.

• 1:56:09Dax Shepard?

  But I do wonder, yes, if we were ever in Michigan, because I very much want to do that. I want to take them on a tour of every place I lived.

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  Didn't you already do that?

• 1:56:17Dax Shepard?

  No, I do that. I did that with my dad when he was dying.

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  You do that with Aaron.

• 1:56:21Dax Shepard?

  Aaron and I always go back to Milford and we look at his house and my house and our junior high and a couple other places we hung out.

• 1:56:30Dax Shepard?

  And we can sit there forever and just look at it.

• 1:56:34Dax Shepard?

  But um, yeah, no, I drove with my dad around and looked at every single place I lived because I wanted to take pictures of it.

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:40Dax Shepard?

  Of which I don't know where they are now, but I had this, but I doubt they would be terribly interested, but they would be nice enough to act interested, but.

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  I think they'd be much more interested in that.

• 1:56:51Dax Shepard?

  They're just a thing, you know, they're, they're, they're a given. You're not interested at all in them. It's like.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no. Obviously, the older you get, you become more and more interested because you start seeing, you start understanding that they're you.

• 1:57:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  That you come from that.

• 1:57:07Dax Shepard?

  Like, would you, I would love to see where Ashok lived.

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  That I, that I love.

• 1:57:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  And I have, I've been there. I, I, when I was little.

• 1:57:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  Um, we stayed there and like, I love that, like, that that's our family history. That's what I mean. I think part of it's the location.

• 1:57:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  Obviously, seeing something in India, I mean, that really, like, you grew up in a village.

• 1:57:31Dax Shepard?

  I know, you don't even have to say anything. He's just like, here you go.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's cool. But even like, even in Savannah, I feel like we would go by sometimes the first house my mom lived in.

• 1:57:46Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  And I thought, I think that's cool.

• 1:57:48Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay, good. But I've been increasingly embarrassed about my self-indulgence.

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:57:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and it's pretty self-indulgence, like.

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  Well, you can just go by yourself. Maybe you just don't need to bring her.

• 1:57:58Dax Shepard?

  I would have gone without her.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, I go.

• 1:58:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:02Dax Shepard?

  And I generally, what she got spared is I also drive down the alley and I pull into my old spot.

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  Oh, you do?

• 1:58:07Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:58:09Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  That's funny.

• 1:58:11Dax Shepard?

  You know, I was very superstitious about that apartment. Because again, I lived in it for a decade.

• 1:58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:18Dax Shepard?

  At the time I left, I had lived in it for more than a third of my life.

• 1:58:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:58:23Dax Shepard?

  And we moved so much as kids that like, I came to like, just love how permanent that was.

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:28Dax Shepard?

  And I was so afraid to move into the house here in Los Feliz. I just thought my whole world was gonna unravel.

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:36Dax Shepard?

  And I had this fantasy that I was gonna like, rebuild it in my garage identically.

• 1:58:42Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:58:43Dax Shepard?

  So that I could go like, sit in it and remember the hunger and write in there maybe.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:48Dax Shepard?

  And, and, and I still have so many recurring dreams about that apartment.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  That is weird because we were just talking about.

• 1:58:59Dax Shepard?

  I don't have it with that house.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were just talking about it with the house where you're just like, I don't care.

• 1:59:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:03Speaker 01

  I don't care to be back there.

• 1:59:05Dax Shepard?

  Well, I think a lot of it is like, I think where you cement your identity. Like, I cemented so many parts of my identity in that 20 to 30, in that apartment.

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:19Dax Shepard?

  That I still kinda defined myself as.

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:22Dax Shepard?

  And that, I kinda came to this house already baked.

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  Sure, interesting.

• 1:59:28Dax Shepard?

  The kids are the new addition there.

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a huge thing.

• 1:59:32Dax Shepard?

  And the only part I'm nostalgic about is, I was saying when we talked about it, is like, I see pictures of when the kids played there.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:38Dax Shepard?

  That kinda gets me emotional.

• 1:59:39Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, so I'm very nostalgic for that house.

• 1:59:43Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  Uh, very, like, we did so mu- I mean, I guess so much of all of our relationships were.

• 1:59:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:53Speaker 01

  Built there.

• 1:59:53Dax Shepard?

  The movie room, how many shows we won.

• 1:59:55Speaker 01

  We watched so many shows. We wa- we played so many games.

• 2:00:00Dax Shepard?

  Yes, at that booth.

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  We were outside all the time.

• 2:00:03Dax Shepard?

  It was a very good patio to hang on.

• 2:00:05Speaker 01

  It was great, and, and yeah, and the, the babies and like, I, I have a lot of nostalgia for that house.

• 2:00:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:12Speaker 01

  Sometimes when, like, on Halloween, because your sister lives there, on Halloween, we'll, you know, stop by there for candy.

• 2:00:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  And almost always, the group is always like, god.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Remember?

• 2:00:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:25Speaker 01

  Like, everyone thought it was just like, God, we were just here all the time.

• 2:00:29Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:00:30Speaker 01

  So, I have, I have some nostalgia for that, but maybe also because it's still in your family, that might make a difference.

• 2:00:37Dax Shepard?

  Yes, it's not gone.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:00:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's funny, because I, we were, yesterday I had dinner with my parents on Fairfax, and so we were blocks away from Anthony, where Anthony and I lived.

• 2:00:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  Which I guess I would say, like, I'm trying to think of what I'm the most nostalgic for space-wise.

• 2:00:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  I mean, it's gonna be the apartment I was just in.

• 2:01:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  Uh, but probably that one on Gardner, the one that Kristen also lived in.

• 2:01:07Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:01:08Speaker 01

  Ten years before that, um, because I, then I think I brought this up recently, like, we did improv practice there, and we played running shows, we had no money, we, so I am nostalgic, but I didn't feel like, oh, let's drive by Gardner, like, I didn't, in fact, I'm kinda like.

• 2:01:26Dax Shepard?

  I don't ever wanna see it.

• 2:01:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I kinda just like it in my head, and I don't wanna see that again.

• 2:01:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, weird.

• 2:01:35Dax Shepard?

  Uh, last thing I'll add is, I also, in the continuing updates on the movies, I decided to show Lincoln The Prestige. I invited you and your family.

• 2:01:46Speaker 01

  That's right, great movie.

• 2:01:48Dax Shepard?

  It's better than you remember.

• 2:01:49Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:01:50Dax Shepard?

  It is a flawless movie. It's so fucking good, and, uh, Lincoln was blown away, the end, the twist at the end is so juicy.

• 2:02:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:02:01Dax Shepard?

  She was so rattled, that at the end, I looked at her and I said, I have to tell you something, I'm also an identical twin.

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  No!

• 2:02:09Dax Shepard?

  And she goes, she screamed, "Oh, Daddy, don't say it!", like, the movie affected her so much. It was just so fun to watch the power of a movie when it's great. She was like, she hated the thought that there were two of me, and she didn't know which one she had had certain memories with.

• 2:02:24Speaker 01

  Oh, that's funny.

• 2:02:27Dax Shepard?

  And I had to convince her I wasn't a twin.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  See, you had to walk it back.

• 2:02:30Dax Shepard?

  I did, big time.

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  Um, okay.

• 2:02:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  Let's do some facts.

• 2:02:34Dax Shepard?

  Let's do facts.

• 2:02:38Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 2:02:44Dax Shepard?

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. October 10th is World Mental Health Day, but you don't need a day on the calendar to give yourself permission to talk to someone. I've been in therapy for a long time and the stuff rattling around in my head always just quiets down the second I say it out loud. And it doesn't have to be some big life crisis. Maybe it's a work thing that's taking up too much space or hard relationship moment, or just a feeling that something's off. That's enough. That's worth talking about.

• 2:03:22Speaker 01

  You know, I love therapy more than anything. Gets me through. Often I'll want to cancel because I'm like, I don't really have anything to talk about. And then I'll go and I have some major revelation.

• 2:03:34Dax Shepard?

  You know, I was just talking to a friend who has just started it. And I said, one of the most powerful elements of it is just hearing yourself say out loud the thing that's been ruminating in your head and how different it sounds once it's out into the world. You gain perspective immediately just by hearing yourself say it.

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you do.

• 2:03:49Dax Shepard?

  If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside the U.S.? You can still get 10% off your first month. Do yourself a favor and just try it. Future you will be grateful. Visit betterhelp.com/dax to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com slash DAX.

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  Did you have dairy?

• 2:04:25Dax Shepard?

  No, there was some in my salad last night, my little gem salad.

• 2:04:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:04:29Dax Shepard?

  At Cara.

• 2:04:30Speaker 01

  Oh, nice.

• 2:04:31Dax Shepard?

  It had been a minute.

• 2:04:31Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 2:04:32Dax Shepard?

  I avoided as much of it as I could.

• 2:04:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:04:35Dax Shepard?

  And I hated pushing aside that yummy Parmesan. You know, the salad, right?

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  The cheese is so good on it.

• 2:04:40Dax Shepard?

  It's phenomenal Parmesan. And I hated. I wish I had asked for no cheese because I hated seeing.

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:47Dax Shepard?

  And I felt like I was wasting money, too.

• 2:04:49Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:04:50Dax Shepard?

  Like, oh, this is, where's this going? This is expensive Parmesan.

• 2:04:52Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:04:53Dax Shepard?

  That I'm not eating.

• 2:04:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would be very tempting to see it there and not have it in your bite.

• 2:04:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had some truffled fries, though.

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  That's yummy.

• 2:05:03Dax Shepard?

  That hit the spot.

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  Is there parm on that?

• 2:05:05Dax Shepard?

  I think there is a little bit, so you know, it's a little scattywampus.

• 2:05:10Speaker 01

  Okay, that's okay.

• 2:05:11Dax Shepard?

  I mean, minimally, it's a reduction.

• 2:05:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:13Dax Shepard?

  And then someone in the comments suggested I take an enzyme called DOA or DAO.

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:05:19Dax Shepard?

  This is a ding ding ding. It was like, hey, there's this enzyme I take before I eat, and it's like a kind of a histamine blocker. And my nose runs after every time I eat. And I was like, mine, too.

• 2:05:29Speaker 01

  Oh, so does my mom's.

• 2:05:29Dax Shepard?

  So I ordered it, and then it went out to Cara, and then Hannah said to Kristen, "Did you take your enzyme?" And she goes, "No, I forgot it." And I go, "Wait, what enzyme?" And Hannah goes, "I was suggesting that Kristen take DOA or DAO for histamines, so she doesn't get itchy. I've been using it, and I like it." And I was like, "Well, this is crazy."

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  That's weird.

• 2:05:51Dax Shepard?

  Because I just heard about it in the comments and ordered it, and it comes tomorrow, and you guys have already hopped up on it.

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  That's sim.

• 2:05:58Dax Shepard?

  Sim.

• 2:05:58Speaker 01

  Very, very sim. Okay, this is for Catherine Paige Harden. So, did I go to Collierville Elementary School? No. I had to ask my mom this.

• 2:06:09Dax Shepard?

  Oh, this is the Memphis period?

• 2:06:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:06:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  She said Collierville Elementary, and I said, and I think I said, "Yeah." But I was like, "I don't think that's right." I texted my mom. She said I went to Farmington Elementary.

• 2:06:22Dax Shepard?

  She remembered.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  Nope, she said she had to look it up.

• 2:06:25Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you know, because that's impressive.

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then I was like, "Oh, yeah, Farmington."

• 2:06:31Dax Shepard?

  Although I have a hunch I'll remember my kid's name. I don't want to say it out loud, but I'll remember the name of my kid's elementary.

• 2:06:38Speaker 01

  You will.

• 2:06:39Dax Shepard?

  But you were there briefly.

• 2:06:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was at, I went to five elementary schools.

• 2:06:45Dax Shepard?

  You did? Why? You had only one big move, right?

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  Well. First school Peachtree Elementary.

• 2:06:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  Classic.

• 2:06:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  Kindergarten first grade. Then we moved to Collierville and went to Farmington

• 2:06:59Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:07:00Speaker 01

  For second and third grade.

• 2:07:01Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:07:02Speaker 01

  Then we moved back. Oh, sorry, I'm wrong. I went to four elementary schools.

• 2:07:06Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:07:06Speaker 01

  Okay, so we moved back, um, and I went to Berkeley.

• 2:07:11Dax Shepard?

  School of Music?

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was a savant. Um, I went to Berkeley Lake. Cause we, we rented a house.

• 2:07:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  And then we bought a house.

• 2:07:23Dax Shepard?

  There's still the house.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  That is still the house and that, then I went, so then I went to Chattahoochee Elementary my fifth grade.

• 2:07:30Dax Shepard?

  Wow. We don't talk about this.

• 2:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I moved a lot.

• 2:07:33Dax Shepard?

  I feel like this is even more significant than your ethnicity.

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  It's all in the stew.

• 2:07:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  It's all in the stew.

• 2:07:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. I mean, you really had to start over.

• 2:07:43Speaker 01

  I moved a lot.

• 2:07:44Dax Shepard?

  Was there any people from Peachtree in the final elementary?

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  Uh, no.

• 2:07:49Dax Shepard?

  No?

• 2:07:49Speaker 01

  Mm-mm.

• 2:07:50Dax Shepard?

  So brand new start in fifth grade?

• 2:07:52Speaker 01

  Well, no. So, brand new start in fourth grade.

• 2:07:56Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  And then, brand new start again in fifth grade.

• 2:08:00Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Right, so fifth grade, and then you stuck with those kids for junior high and?

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  Well, then it was very fun, is then in sixth grade, some people from fourth grade, you know, like then people came back into the fold, which was cool.

• 2:08:15Dax Shepard?

  That would have happened to me had I gone to Milford High and not switched districts.

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that one of my first simest moments was, um, there was a girl in my fourth grade class, Ashley, and she was so popular.

• 2:08:29Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:08:30Speaker 01

  And so cool and pretty, and I wanted to be her pretty badly.

• 2:08:34Dax Shepard?

  Which was really quick, let's pause. When you think about the ability for one to be super cool in fourth grade, it's not even really a thing. Like, I'm looking at fourth graders.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  I know, but like the way they eat lunch and stuff is just cooler.

• 2:08:46Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And she was also really nice.

• 2:08:49Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  But she was cool and pretty. No.

• 2:08:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, good for her.

• 2:08:53Speaker 01

  Her name was Ashley and I was like, kinda trying to, you know, I was like, Trying to be her friend, but you know, um, we weren't really good friends. But I do think I was invited to her birthday party.

• 2:09:01Dax Shepard?

  That's big.

• 2:09:02Speaker 01

  She had so many Beanie Babies. Um, her, like, her mom was into it.

• 2:09:07Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 2:09:08Speaker 01

  And so she had so many and they were like in cases and stuff, not like fucking Valentino and LaBert. She just like, I rode all over them and stuff. I didn't know what I was doing.

• 2:09:17Dax Shepard?

  Do you think moms in the South were more into Beanie Babies than moms in the North? I, I do for some reason.

• 2:09:22Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah.

• 2:09:23Dax Shepard?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  My mom was real into Beanie Babies though, too.

• 2:09:26Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:09:27Speaker 03

  With my sister.

• 2:09:29Speaker 01

  Was she like getting them for her and bringing them home like, uh, we got truffles?

• 2:09:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, they had a whole bin.

• 2:09:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was always trying to get my mom to be like that.

• 2:09:39Dax Shepard?

  Okay, but driven by your sister?

• 2:09:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:42Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:09:42Speaker 01

  I know, it's a little, it's a little.

• 2:09:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like there's women who collect dollars and it's not because they have kids.

• 2:09:47Speaker 01

  No, no, also, no, the purpose of this is like ultimately to like have a billion dollars. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:55Dax Shepard?

  I know, I don't want to comment on that.

• 2:09:56Speaker 01

  Okay, anyway, so, so then I moved and then I went to fifth grade away from Ashley. And then in sixth, I, I thought about her. And before sixth grade, I was like, oh, like, I wonder if like Ashley will be there, like.

• 2:10:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  And on the ride home, the bus ride home on the first day of school, guess who's on my bus?

• 2:10:22Dax Shepard?

  Ashley.

• 2:10:24Speaker 01

  And guess why? Her parents got divorced and her mom moved into my neighborhood.

• 2:10:28Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:10:29Speaker 01

  And we became.

• 2:10:32Speaker 01

  Best friends.

• 2:10:33Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:10:34Speaker 01

  Best friends. I, we lived, I mean, I lived at her house, I just, she didn't live at mine. But yeah, get off at her stop. One time, my dad got really mad because we got lost in the neighborhood and he couldn't find us. And he like really panicked and we were, all we were doing was jumping on someone's trampoline. But anyway, um, so we were best friends and, uh, we were best friends for a long time. She was, uh, my cheerleading squad.

• 2:10:58Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  Also a double state champ.

• 2:11:01Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my goodness, okay.

• 2:11:02Speaker 01

  We still talk, we ta, we texted recently. Yes, I love her. Um, and we were boy crazy and we wrote in each other's diaries.

• 2:11:09Dax Shepard?

  Did she stay like on top of the heap?

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:11:12Dax Shepard?

  Oh, she did.

• 2:11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:13Dax Shepard?

  Some people just.

• 2:11:13Speaker 01

  And she deserved it. She really deserved it. She's a great, great lady.

• 2:11:18Dax Shepard?

  She's a great leader.

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, she is. Anyway, um, yeah, I did a lot of moving, so, uh, Farmington. Now, is it pronounced Pelagius or Pelagius? Unfortunately, it's pronounced Pelagius.

• 2:11:33Dax Shepard?

  I don't.

• 2:11:34Speaker 01

  You didn't like that?

• 2:11:35Dax Shepard?

  I like Pelagius more.

• 2:11:36Speaker 01

  I know, that's what you said.

• 2:11:37Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I did then. Okay, good, I'm consistent. Sometimes I were, I'm not even consistent.

• 2:11:41Speaker 01

  And she, cause she was saying Pelagius.

• 2:11:44Dax Shepard?

  That sounds nice, yeah.

• 2:11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you were like, yeah, and she was like, I don't know, some people say Pelagius, and you said, I like Pelagius. But it's Pelagius.

• 2:11:51Dax Shepard?

  It's Pelagius.

• 2:11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. How many genes do humans have? Remember, we were, we were-

• 2:11:57Dax Shepard?

  I was, I'm so embarrassed still.

• 2:11:59Speaker 01

  Well-

• 2:12:00Dax Shepard?

  I was talking about individual ACGTs-

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:12:03Dax Shepard?

  DNA strand, which is in the billions, but it was only twenty some thousand.

• 2:12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, she said around twenty thousand. Yes, humans have approximately twenty to twenty-five thousand protein coding genes.

• 2:12:13Dax Shepard?

  Fuck, God, that was human. I mean, what a factor I was off by.

• 2:12:17Speaker 01

  Um, it's a low number, similar to that of many organisms, which is embarrassing. For us.

• 2:12:24Dax Shepard?

  What I walked away with from this, and I've already been in a couple of conversations, cause it comes up all the time, like, oh, they found the gene for a blank. They found the gene, and I go, you know, I just had this expert on, I was like, almost nothing isn't polygenetic.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:12:36Dax Shepard?

  Almost nothing is one gene.

• 2:12:38Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:12:39Dax Shepard?

  Which is encouraging.

• 2:12:41Speaker 01

  It is.

• 2:12:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:42Speaker 01

  It's like, it's hard to get some of this stuff.

• 2:12:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I gave the example she gave about height. It's like two hundred genes that you could be one standard deviation above, and that's gonna result in seven feet tall.

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  I know. But there are some, she's like sickle cell.

• 2:12:57Dax Shepard?

  I've had this great curiosity of how people are keep getting taller, like their parents, like, how are they getting so much taller? So many people that I look around, they're, all their kids are always taller than them. Aaron's kid, I think about it all the time. Like, wait, is six-three or four?

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:12Dax Shepard?

  And his ex-wife isn't tall, and Aaron's five, he's six foot.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:17Dax Shepard?

  But like, what, where does that come, who had the gene? Well, it wasn't-

• 2:13:21Speaker 01

  It wasn't that. I know, we're learning so much.

• 2:13:24Dax Shepard?

  The only thing, I'm bummed I didn't have any boys, cause I would like to see, like, would I get a six foot five boy? Because I I exceeded my father. He had exceeded his.

• 2:13:35Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 2:13:35Dax Shepard?

  Presumably, I might have a weight on my hands.

• 2:13:38Speaker 01

  Well, the girls will probably be taller than Kristen.

• 2:13:42Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes. Although Delta's tracking much more Kristen-wise.

• 2:13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:49Dax Shepard?

  But bigger than her at her age.

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  Right, exactly, yeah. Because like Lincoln's already taller than me, I think, or at least my height.

• 2:13:58Dax Shepard?

  She's probably your height now.

• 2:14:00Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah. Um, and Delta's getting there.

• 2:14:03Dax Shepard?

  She's getting there. She wants to get there faster.

• 2:14:06Speaker 01

  I know, it's so cute.

• 2:14:08Dax Shepard?

  Like, she lost a tooth the other day and she was ecstatic. She called me bloody, still actively bleeding, ecstatic. She wants to get rid of those baby teeth. She hates them.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  She did tell, she was like, I lost my, I lost my tooth. And I had known that this was a big deal.

• 2:14:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:25Speaker 01

  And then she brought it up again later. Did I tell you? I was like, yeah.

• 2:14:28Dax Shepard?

  Well, you know, when she went to the dentist and they x-rayed her mouth, she started bawling when he said it's gonna be a while, and she was devastated.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:34Dax Shepard?

  I don't remember having any thoughts about my teeth. They probably just all fell out really quick, so I.

• 2:14:39Speaker 01

  I know, I don't remember caring about that. But yeah, I must have been on par. It's hard, it's hard when you're, everyone else is, it's happening and you get worried. Um, oh, another pronunciation, retributively.

• 2:14:53Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 2:14:53Speaker 01

  Retributively. Oh, how many times did Second Chance attack his owner?

• 2:14:58Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 2:14:59Speaker 01

  I really got a kick out of the fact that his name was Second Chance.

• 2:15:02Dax Shepard?

  Have you?

• 2:15:04Speaker 01

  The This American Life.

• 2:15:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:05Speaker 01

  I did a long time ago, but I don't remember it.

• 2:15:08Dax Shepard?

  This American Life for a minute had a video show.

• 2:15:11Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:15:12Dax Shepard?

  But, um, I watched that.

• 2:15:14Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 2:15:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, it's called, on This American Life, the story is called If By Chance We Meet Again.

• 2:15:21Dax Shepard?

  Hmm. Very nice name.

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  Such a good name.

• 2:15:24Dax Shepard?

  So elegant.

• 2:15:25Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, Ralph and Sandra Fisher, who run a show animal business in Texas, had a beloved Brahmin bull named Chance. Chance was the gentlest bull they'd ever seen, more like a pet dog than a bull. They loved him. Kids loved him. He had a long career in movies, on TV, performing at parties. And when he finally died, Ralph and Cindy were devastated. Around that time, scientists at Texas A&M University were looking for animal subjects for a cloning project. They already had some tissue from Chance because they treated him for an illness. So Ralph and Cindy offered up Chance's DNA for the experiment. Second Chance was born. Um, and he was eerily, just like Chance.

• 2:16:04Dax Shepard?

  I'm telling.

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  Except he wasn't, which they found out the hard way. Um, but I looked up twice. It was twice, but it was-

• 2:16:11Dax Shepard?

  It was two goings.

• 2:16:12Speaker 01

  Bad, um-

• 2:16:13Dax Shepard?

  I wonder where we're at now. I mean, that, that story was-

• 2:16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:16Dax Shepard?

  Twelve years ago. I wonder if there's been subsequent-

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  Do you think? Wow, yeah.

• 2:16:20Dax Shepard?

  I hope he's old.

• 2:16:21Speaker 01

  First occurred on the bull's second birthday. I mean, two-year-olds, you know, tantrums.

• 2:16:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:26Speaker 01

  Where Fisher barely escaped and a second, more severe attack happened about a year later, resulting in significant injuries to Fisher, including a fractured spine.

• 2:16:34Dax Shepard?

  Duh, fuck. I can't imagine how terrible it would be to be attacked by a bull.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 2:16:40Dax Shepard?

  The huge horns and that strong neck. You see them pick up cars and stuff when they want. They're, they're insanely strong.

• 2:16:46Speaker 01

  I don't think the eye thing would necessarily work for them. Maybe.

• 2:16:50Dax Shepard?

  If they were out cold.

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:52Dax Shepard?

  I would try to get its horns lodged in the cage.

• 2:16:54Speaker 01

  Are you gonna put your, do you think the fingers in your butt thing's gonna work?

• 2:16:58Dax Shepard?

  Might as well. I mean, it's free.

• 2:17:01Dax Shepard?

  It was always, always do that as you're so-

• 2:17:06Speaker 01

  Um, okay, the exact figures on the dyslexia numbers are, yeah, two to five times more likely to be in leadership roles compared to the general pop. It also says dyslexia affects roughly 10 to 15% of the general population. 25 to 35% of entrepreneurs were in the surveys, and 20 to 40% of self-made millionaires show signs of dyslexia.

• 2:17:31Dax Shepard?

  I think increasingly, they're starting to look at if dyslexia is a thing, or if it's just ADHD, by the way. I've read, oh, go ahead.

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  Okay, so yeah, people with dyslexia are 2.4 times more likely to drop out of high school without proper intervention. They're also up to three times more likely to be identified with ADHD, as 35 to 45% of those with dyslexia also have ADHD. Boys are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with dyslexia than girls.

• 2:17:57Dax Shepard?

  Which would be consistent with what our ADHD experts said that boys get. Labeled ADHD at seven or eight years old.

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:05Dax Shepard?

  And women at thirty six.

• 2:18:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:18:07Dax Shepard?

  And so, yeah, that all kind of holds.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, that's it. That's it for Catherine Paige Harden.

• 2:18:15Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I liked it because it was a great philosophical question. When I think of it in terms of myself, it, it, without any testing, it would seem I am of one of these packages she's talking about.

• 2:18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would, I would agree.

• 2:18:30Dax Shepard?

  And I also have other stuff to offer and it's very interesting.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  Well, you haven't, you know, killed anyone that I know of.

• 2:18:36Dax Shepard?

  I haven't killed anyone, but I have had moments of aggression towards other men.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:18:42Dax Shepard?

  Other men have been hurt.

• 2:18:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:18:46Dax Shepard?

  By me in battle.

• 2:18:50Speaker 01

  Rob, have you ever punched someone in the face?

• 2:18:53Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 2:18:55Speaker 01

  Me either, yet.

• 2:18:56Dax Shepard?

  Yet.

• 2:18:57Speaker 01

  Not, I'm not ruling it out. It doesn't seem fun. I have to be honest. Like, it doesn't seem even fun. Like, the, like, the, it seemed, first of all, it seems like it hurts really bad to the puncher. Like, to even on my hand, it seems like that would hurt really bad.

• 2:19:14Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Well, you know, I have broke my hand.

• 2:19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:17Dax Shepard?

  And I have missed knuckles that are submerged from it. So, yeah. But I'm, I try to make this case to other, you don't feel anything.

• 2:19:25Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 2:19:26Dax Shepard?

  There's no, there's no pain whatsoever.

• 2:19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:30Dax Shepard?

  The next day, you might feel sore, but that's what's funny is I think when you're a boy, you're so afraid of how much it's gonna hurt. And then come to find out, it doesn't hurt at all. None of it hurts. Your, your brain goes straight to its primitive.

• 2:19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:44Dax Shepard?

  Knows what to do state. The fun isn't the contact, it's the.

• 2:19:50Speaker 01

  I took someone down.

• 2:19:51Dax Shepard?

  Going to get hurt. That's what it is. Like, oh, I landed, oh, I'm in charge, oh, I'm not gonna get hurt. That's like the elation in a fight is if you're in charge and control.

• 2:20:03Speaker 01

  Right. But it's also like justice, like, kind of, for, I think, like...

• 2:20:09Dax Shepard?

  Yes, but I think, once it kicks off,

• 2:20:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:11Dax Shepard?

  I think this, all this primitive wiring happens, and it's really just like, "Oh, I have to maintain the upper hand, or I'm gonna get really, really hurt." And so long as you're in control, there is this elation of like, "Oh, I'm gonna get out of this, I'm gonna win this, I'm not gonna get hurt."

• 2:20:27Speaker 01

  But when people start fights...

• 2:20:29Dax Shepard?

  That's all pride and ego.

• 2:20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's like, it, it, it's, it can't be about that, cuz they've decided, right? So like, that is about...

• 2:20:37Dax Shepard?

  For sure, and when I have like, stood up to the dickhead at the bar, I have this, for sure, charge of justice.

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right.

• 2:20:45Dax Shepard?

  And pride of that I will...

• 2:20:47Speaker 01

  I'll be the one to handle this.

• 2:20:48Dax Shepard?

  I'll be the one to shut this down. But then, once the action starts, this full other mindset starts.

• 2:20:55Speaker 01

  Alright, that's it.

• 2:20:56Dax Shepard?

  Crazy note to end it, but I guess it was apropos.

• 2:20:59Speaker 01

  It was, it was all part of it. I love you.

• 2:21:02Dax Shepard?

  Love you.